Hello, and thank you for receiving this email!
Since this is a fairly utilitarian missive, and even a bit time-sensitive in nature, I’ll get right to it and link to the web-shop here, as it is now freshly stocked with a sparkling winter collection made for gifting and bringing some light & warmth to the dark season. In addition, books and prints are currently 20% off.
Come back and keep reading if you’d like to hear some reflections about this collection and what’s next for the coming year. Thank you for taking a look! I truly appreciate it, and I hope you find something in the shop that delights you.
The name for this collection “Embers in the Earth’s Heart” came to me on a walk in between shifts tending the wood-fired kiln at Cobb Mountain Art and Ecology Center. The image of the bed of almost-white-hot coals growing inside the brick body of the kiln remaining in my mind, I saw it as a sacred heart, saw how a fire inside of an interior becomes a living body.
All the pieces in this collection are bound by this sense of being born from light within dark, born from the bodies of fire-animated interiors. The pomegranates all pulled from a kiln kept constantly fed for 4 days and nights—which at its peak reached 2400 degrees fahrenheit. The sun’s energy stored in wood metabolized and alchemized inside the body of the kiln, akin to the bee’s transmutation of flowers into fragrant wax inside their own warm hive-body’s interiority. The glow of copper, born in the earth’s own deep interior, formed in hydrothermal veins emerging from underground magma chambers, unearthed and formed into the bodies of deer, bird, bear.
“If all that changes slowly may be explained by life, all that changes quickly is explained by fire. Fire is the ultra-living element. It is intimate and it is universal. It lives in our heart. It lives in the sky. It rises from the depths of the substance and offers itself with the warmth of love. Or it can go back down into the substance and hide there, latent and pent-up, like hate and vengeance. Among all phenomena, it is really the only one to which there be so definitely attributed the opposing values of good and evil. It shines in Paradise. It burns in Hell.”
- Gaston Bachelard, Psychoanalysis of Fire
Tenderness does not choose its own uses.
It goes out to everything equally,
circling rabbit and hawk.
Look: in the iron bucket,
a single nail, a single ruby –
all the heavens and hells.
They rattle in the heart and make one sound.
-Jane Hirshfield, Late Prayer
It is my hope that this winter collection holds a bright, warming and life-giving energy, as well as the energy of a shift in my studio practice— marked by a quieter, more internal process, and with it a resurgence of enthusiasm, discovery and peace while engaged with the making. Grappling with the paradox of staying permeable to the outer world and staying attentive to my own intimate life, and continually learning how the “delineation” between the two is itself not a hard and impermeable thing. The paradox of how heaven and hell are both here on earth all at once, intertwined. How the grappling is continual— nothing is static, and to keep ourselves and this world alive requires constant attuning and tending. The last few years I’ve had a fairly outwards focus with my studio practice, primarily on commissioned copper pieces and custom candles, often as memorials for loved ones, celebrations of weddings, and other “threshold” moments that span and blur the spectrum of deepest human joy and grief. It has been one of the biggest joys and honors of my life to get to make this work! And yet, I can feel that it is time for a shift in focus, and I am beginning to attune more to the needs and desires of my practice’s own interior flame. I am looking forward to tending that internal hearth fire throughout this upcoming year, and excited to share what emerges from it. My visions include continued apprenticeship to wood-firing, experiments with lost wax casting, and a return to my original love, painting. A balance of long hours of solitude in the studio and the communal gathering of wood-fire.
This season, may you find many moments of connection that keep your own heart’s hearth tended — with your beloveds, with strangers, with the more-than-human world. Especially in these times when the simultaneous unfolding of this world’s horror and beauty is so stark and inescapably heart-breaking, every moment of tending and tenderness counts.
With care,
Catherine
Beautiful. Thank you for sharing this work and words!