I made a mobile sculpture recently and it marks my first sculpture piece as a full time woodworker and the most technically challenging to date- and it is the second sculpture I have made, so pretty, pretty green when it comes to the world of sculpture. It was a super fun piece to make and it started from a failure, rather, a perceived failure.

I felt silence in my body when I hit a catch on the platters edge while I was turning a piece of wood from my Maryland stock on my Laguna lathe. I watched the pieces of wood fill my immediate space like fireworks. My excitement and momentum shot up in the air along with the scattered pieces and fell like dust on the ground along with my penetrable, newbie confidence. 

What remained was the rough start of the largest circle, the “sun” in this sculpture. I looked at this, nearly paper thin, beautiful piece of spalted maple and I knew that it wanted to be something. So, I gently cleaned up the sides with my bowl gouge and sanded it down to a smooth finish.

I thought about making a frisbee. No, that wasn’t right. I caught the suns, sheer light through the top of the tenon and I thought of cutting out that space and carving it into a boomerang. No, that wasn’t right, either. I set the delicate piece of maple to the side on my brick window sill in my studio, for a month or so until I hit another catch with a different project, and another and another. I felt my determination sink to the bottom of my stomach each time a piece exploded and as I walked the remnants to the burn pile, my solar plexus tickled me and I thought twice. I put these outcasts back on my lathe, cleaned and sanded them before placing them alongside their parent, “sun” I had blown up just over a month past. With very little thought and mostly guided by instinct, I was assembling a planetary inspired sculpture born from the failures of other projects. 

Each step in marrying and suspending these pieces provided a unique set of challenges and it connected me to the space and time that swaddles all of us in each of our vastly unique, cosmic forms. The largest, the first and the focal point of this sculpture embodies the sun, the moon and the clouded horizon cradled above an ocean. When the light catches the paper thin space above its center it invokes images of sunrises and sunsets above expansive bodies of water and the two posts suspended from its earth was turned to represent the feminine body. 

I am so happy this piece exists. I have often found myself struggling to find safe space in a society that has a habit of ostracizing missteps and those who error- others. I grow and find joy through exploration and I learn about myself and my environments through the application of trial and error. Within the parameters of those environments, success pales in comparison to the richness of character a failure brings my way. 

Working with this piece has brought back a sense of joy and wonder to the time I spend with my work and myself. My curiosity and playfulness met the missteps my limited understanding perceived and gave little breathing room to the energy of internalized shame I have picked up along the way, and have carried for some time from a society that is strengthened by it and from people who were also struggling under the same societal umbrella, just on different ground and with a different view of things.

This piece aligned me with my joy and positioned my gaze on potential and I’m sure happy all these tiny mistakes exist.