What inspires me · Ongoing
Mexico
My brother lives in the jungle in Pueblo Sacbé, a community near Playa del Carmen, so this is a place I keep coming back to rather than a single trip. Limestone and cenote water, seed pods the color of dark chocolate, roots that behave like sculpture, and a sky that puts on a different show every evening. I come home from every visit with material and with ideas.
The water in the jungle
A cenote pool holding that impossible blue, with ferns leaning in over the edge and sunken branches resting on the bottom. The jungle grows right up to the water and then stops. That line — dense green against open clear space — is the same one I'm working with every time I leave part of a piece empty.
Seed pods, almost black
Long dark pods laid out on a pale table with one green noni fruit next to them. That deep brown-black is a color I can't mix and can't fake, and the shapes are already the kind of line I'd want running through a piece.
Roots doing the sculpting
A tree that grew straight over limestone and left its roots exposed, full of hollows and arches. Nothing about it was planned, and it's better than anything I could plan. This is the shape I keep sketching without meaning to.
The climber on the trunk
A philodendron running up a tree, leaves cut into fingers and catching the light in layers. I think about that layering constantly — how much to overlap, where to let the light through.
A whole wall of green
No gaps, no floor, just leaf over leaf all the way up. When I build something dense, this is what I'm remembering — abundance that still reads as calm.
Bamboo, every shade at once
Green, tan, silver and a near-black cane, all in the same stand. Straight lines that aren't quite straight. I've been wanting to work bamboo into a vertical piece since I stood in this.
Cutting bananas with a machete
This is me, wet from the water, hauling a whole stalk out of the jungle. I include it because the gathering is the work. Everything I build starts with a day like this one.
The sky going orange over the pier
Clouds lit from underneath, the water holding the same color back. Warm over cool — I use that pairing more than any other.
One line of light
Almost the whole sky is blue and there's one stripe of orange across the middle. A reminder that a single accent does more than a dozen.
A deer at the waterline
I looked up and he was standing in the surf. Some mornings the place just hands you something, and all you have to do is be out there.
Other journeys
Want a piece that carries a place you love?
Tell me about the trail, the trip or the room. I'll build toward that feeling with materials I've gathered myself.