My everyday experience of living in this world is filled with details of blooming flowers, soft baby hands that caress my hair, shadows that the sunset washes in flickering movements over the walls in my home. I live intensely through these moments. Close observation and attention to these happenings bring me great joy and a sense of presence that allows me to overcome my personal challenges of being. In this small and wondrous bubble, I know I am lucky to live, when thinking of the absurd weight of the global anxiety of war. Milk bottles, orange juice containers, fragments of breakfast debris drift into my studio and return as rings, necklaces, small acts of transformation. A ring that makes drinking coffee awkward. A necklace that once carried juice. In their silliness I find humour, tenderness, and gratitude: my debris is only plastic from my children’s breakfast table, not rubble from a building near my home.

At the bench, when I saw-pierce metal, the world falls away and at the same time, I come closer to it. By folding and combining materials in unlikely ways, I search for form as both matter and hope. Painting and beading respond to a soul that clenches to infant spontaneity. Necklaces made of plastic from my daily use carry the weight of time itself, prepared for the centuries of their afterlife. To beautify them is a way of taking responsibility. To wear them is to acknowledge their endurance. These works are gestures of play and care, hopeful offerings, objects that may bring people together through use, and smile in their encounter. Most of all, they are a celebration of life in its more intimate and minimal forms of expression.