The Idea That Won't Leave You Alone

Waves

My favorite part of the creative process is the moment an idea shifts from I wonder what would happen if... to something that has never existed before. That transformation is what keeps my work evolving. It's also what gets me out of bed in the morning -- sometimes literally.

Some ideas arrive fully formed. I wake up with them, grab a sketch pad before coffee, and the work is already underway in my head before I'm fully conscious. Other times, a concept simmers in the back of my mind for months, showing up in sketches and half-formed notes, waiting until I finally know how to make it real.

The series that resonate most deeply almost always come from that second category -- the ones that won't let me go until I figure them out. It all stems from years of tapping into my subconscious and allowing myself the freedom to make things -- all sorts of things and ideas that don't always make it out into the light of day.

My wave series is probably the most literally representational thing I make (aside from the brand-new Garden Party Series I debuted in my latest website update), and also one of the most personal. People ask me all the time if I'm from California (ha--that could have been on my most frequently asked questions from my last blog). I actually grew up on the Jersey Shore -- the Atlantic Ocean a few miles away, the beach just part of life. Sandy Hook, Seaside Heights, Avon-by-the-Sea. (And for the record, nobody from here actually says "Joy-zee.") I didn't have to go looking for waves as a concept. They were already in me. Bruce Springsteen never had a surfing hit (he put Asbury Park on the map), but nobody who grew up there needs to wonder what the ocean sounds like.

The waves are among my most labor-intensive pieces, which is probably why I can never keep them in stock. They go fast. There's something about that kind of literal, tactile reference -- water rendered in glass -- that connects with people immediately. But some of the series I find myself most attached to are the ones that came from something more abstract.

Ripple Effect

The Ripple Effect series started during lockdown. In 2020, like a lot of people, I was dealing with a whole host of feelings, fears, and panic all rolled into one -- thoughts that needed to be let out and run screaming down the empty streets. What kept coming back to me was cause and effect -- how one thing compounds into many. A single viral cell, invisible and microscopic, rippling outward until it had disrupted the entire world. I kept thinking about that mechanism. How something that small could touch so many lives. And simultaneously, I was navigating a difficult professional situation, watching how one person's energy could move outward and affect everyone around her -- a completely different scale, but the same pattern. Macro and micro, global and personal, both at once.

Water felt like the right language for that. It always does for me. Thematically, the pieces featured rippling, concentric arcs emanating from a single drop. I started layering elements to physically compound them, because that's how a ripple actually works. It doesn't just spread. It builds on itself. Before this, the elements in my designs butted up to one another, impacting each other only two-dimensionally -- notches cut so gemstones could visually "impact" the glass, or vice versa. With this series it needed to be more -- the entire world was affected, a global catastrophe -- the compounding and piling was intentional, and it added to the dimensionality of the pieces.

Shallow Pool

That series eventually quieted into something else entirely. The Shallow Pool series grew out of the same water vocabulary, but from a calmer emotional place. If Ripple Effect was about disturbance, Shallow Pool is about the surface after the disturbance passes -- that moment on a boat when you look down at the water and watch it move, constant and subtle at the same time. The carving is my most restrained work. It took me years to get it right because my instinct is always to push, to stylize, to make it more. This series required me to do the opposite. The texture is subtle, and only reveals itself when the glass moves, when the light shifts. You have to let it come to you. I think of them privately as puddles and lakes. I like to cluster them together, which feels right -- water finding water. Hindsight being what it is, I can see now that moving from Ripple Effect to Shallow Pool was its own kind of processing.

This season, I gave my newest shallow pool pieces a little update by adding some bubble elements, which I think gives them a freshly-washed-ashore quality.

Voltage

The Voltage series came from an entirely different place. No ocean, no pandemic, no difficult dynamics. This one started with the feeling of falling in love -- that specific tightness in your chest, the combination of containment and total freedom at the same time. Some of the imagery is what you'd expect: the zig-zag, the arc, the visual shorthand for electricity. But the pieces I care most about are the ones trying to capture the feeling underneath that, excitement and newness and the sense that something has shifted in you and you can't un-feel it. Renewed, not just new.

I use my work as a way to process my life. That's not a metaphor -- it's actual art therapy in motion. Problems and emotions and experiences that become something wearable, something beautiful -- something someone else carries with them without needing to know the whole story. I often don't even fully understand it as I'm doing it, and I guess in actuality, I let my subconscious take the lead. These pieces have their own visual language that I don't verbalize until things are mentally resolved, and that often happens well into the making. The work doesn't require explanation. But for me, I can look back at them and know my own visual language and be transported back to that moment the series came into being.

Every series builds on the last one, thematically and technically. The questions I couldn't answer in one body of work show up again in the next, in a different register, while the visual language I’ve created gets absorbed into the overall glossary of my work. At this point, when I say I wonder what would happen if… I'm not starting from scratch. I'm following a train of thought.

Garden Party

And speaking of new chapters, the Garden Party series is the newest one to join that train of thought. It was a long, cold winter this year, and on my walks I kept getting stopped in my tracks by all the early spring flowers pushing their way up. I resisted the idea for a while -- flowers have been done to death since the dawn of time -- but I finally gave in, and once I did, the floodgates opened. There's more coming as I keep expanding the series in my next shop drop, so consider this the first chapter of a story still being written.

On a completely different note…

If you've made it this far, stay another moment while I ask you for a favor. So many of you have left the most beautiful reviews on my website, and I read every single one. They mean more to me than I can say, and they help anyone who has already found my site and might be on the fence about placing an order feel confident enough to take the plunge.

But I'll be honest with you. I've spent a long time focused inside the bubble of my own business, building my site to be as well-rounded as I can, not fully realizing that Google reviews work differently than the reviews listed on my site. They signal to Google that I'm a legitimate business, which makes it more likely that my content shows up in search results and helps new customers find me in the first place. That's what keeps this whole thing going.

I feel a little icky constantly asking for reviews, but if you've loved your piece and have two minutes to spare, I'd be so grateful. I absolutely love making my work and building these relationships, but I honestly hate this part of the business. So pretty please with sugar on top, help me reach a broader audience.

And to the handful of you who have already done this -- you know who you are -- thank you from the bottom of my heart.

You can leave a Google review right here.

Thanks in advance!