​Poor Venus.

According to one version of the ancient myth, she sprang into existence fully formed from sea foam produced after Cronus castrated his father, Uranus, and tossed the offending equipment into the sea.

Yes.
The Goddess of Beauty, Love and Sexuality was born from sea scum and severed genitals.
(Penis AND Uranus? Really???)
​
Botticelli gave the story considerably better public relations.
In The Birth of Venus, his goddess floats gracefully to shore on a scallop shell: naked, golden-haired, impossibly beautiful and, oddly, innocent. She is the embodiment of desire, yet she doesn't appear particularly desirous of anything herself. (To me, she looks sad. With a dash of vapid.)
That contradiction has always fascinated me.
So, my Venus arrives on her shell, too.
But mine is wearing a bunny suit.

Because apparently, somewhere in the 1960’s, nothing said "female sexuality" quite like a cute and fluffy woodland creature with  libidinous leanings.
 
She looks almost sweetly bewildered by the whole business. And perhaps she should be. Like Botticelli's Venus, she's been presented as an object of desire before she seems to have discovered desire for herself.

Therein lies the joke.
​
And perhaps something considerably less funny.
Women have long been handed contradictory instructions about sexuality: Be desirable, but not desiring. Be sexy, but not sexual. Attract attention, but don't appear to want it

​No wonder she looks confused.
Maybe that's why the bunny suit works.
What could be more harmless than a bunny?
Or less threatening? 
Next, we'll meet the goddess behind the bunny ears.

Spring is here.
Sort of.
Our Goddess has awakened from Winter's long sleep, although, apparently, she's not ready to abandon her cocoon altogether. So, she wears it—loosening here, opening there.
Because emerging isn't the same as arriving.
​
She still carries Winter's questions: Am I pretty enough? Thin enough? Good enough? Do you approve?
But something has changed.

Another Goddess has emerged from her cocoon.
She's learned about food. She's learned about beauty. She's learned that thin is good and thinner is apparently better.
Now she learns something even more problematic:
Ask someone else what they think.

Ah, validation! That peculiar habit of handing someone else the measuring stick and then anxiously waiting for the results.
Well?
Does this ass make my butt look big?

​There are, of course, several things wrong with the question.
Beginning with the fact that she's naked.
On a donkey.
Apparently, those details don't concern her.
Yet her bottom does.

The donkey, meanwhile, looks as though it would very much like to be excluded from the conversation.
Its expression could be sympathetic. Perhaps it understands the burden of being judged by appearances.
Or perhaps it's simply thinking:
Lady, I'm an ass. What exactly did you expect?
​
​And maybe that's the joke beneath the joke.
She's looking outward for reassurance when perhaps she should be looking inward. Open-eyed, but not quite seeing. Still measuring herself against standards she didn't invent ​and seeking answers from anyone willing—or unfortunate enough—to provide them.

​She's still in Winter, after all.
Still becoming.
Still learning the difference between being seen and seeing herself.

Exiting Winter's cocoon, our next Goddess enters the world.
And the world has suggestions.

Be attractive.
Be desirable.
Be disciplined.

And above all, be thin.
Very thin.

I know.  I'm admitting my age here, but for women of my generation, thinness wasn't merely one version of beauty. It was the prerequisite. There could be no pretty without thin.

Inspired by Carmen Miranda, the Brazilian Bombshell from the mid 1950’s who introduced fruit basket haberdashery decades before Edible Arrangements arrived on the runway, ‘We are What We Eat’ balances an entire food pyramid on her head: healthy fruits and vegetables near the bottom, followed by increasingly questionable choices as we climb toward the heavens. Bread. Pie. Candy. Chocolate.
And, presiding over the whole nutritional enterprise? A martini.
​Balance is everything.

But look at her.
She doesn't seem entirely convinced.

​Is she leaning because she's struggling to keep everything in balance?
Or is that slight tilt something else entirely?

Maybe she's beginning to suspect the whole arrangement is ridiculous.

After all, We Are What We Eat may have less to do with what's on our plates than with what we're fed.
Ideas about beauty.
Ideas about our bodies.
Ideas about what we must deny ourselves in order to belong.
We consume those too.
And some of them take a very long time to digest.
Perhaps becoming begins when we start questioning the menu.
​

​If our Playboy Bunny represented female sexuality as imagined from the outside, this Goddess is what happens when the woman herself gets a vote.
Suddenly, two arms simply aren't enough.
Inspired by the multi-armed goddesses of Hindu tradition, she stands bare-breasted and unapologetic, crowned in pearls, holding four objects freighted with several thousand years of ideas about women, sex, temptation and knowledge.
And, just to keep things complicated, she's wearing a chastity belt.
Mixed messages, anyone?

​In one hand, an orchid—a nod to Georgia O'Keeffe and those lush, sensual flowers that generations of viewers have insisted on seeing as female anatomy. O'Keeffe herself resisted that interpretation, which makes the reference even more interesting: once again, who gets to decide what the female image means—the woman who created it, or the people looking at it?

​In another hand, the apple and the serpent. Eve takes a bite, humanity falls, and somehow the woman has been answering for it ever since. Curiosity becomes disobedience. Knowledge becomes sin. Female appetite becomes dangerous.

​Then there is the owl of Athena, goddess of wisdom. Because perhaps knowing—knowing one's mind, one's body, one's desires—isn't something to fear after all.

And finally, Pandora's vessel. Not a box, despite what centuries of retelling have taught us, but a pithos—a large Greek storage jar. Pandora opens it and releases suffering into the world.
Another curious woman.
Another catastrophe.
Another woman blamed.
But the story has an important footnote: Hope remained.
Perhaps that deserves more attention.
​
Our Goddess holds all these contradictions simultaneously: temptation and wisdom, innocence and experience, restraint and desire, danger and hope. Her breasts are exposed while her sexuality is literally under lock and key. Pearls—those old symbols of purity—form an extravagant crown on the head of a woman who no longer looks particularly interested in being pure for anyone.

And look at her face.
Unlike our bewildered Bunny Venus, she doesn't seem to be asking how she should be seen.
She knows we're looking.
She just doesn't appear terribly concerned about what we think.
Maybe that's the reality of female sexuality: not a single thing at all. Not something bestowed by an admirer, defined by a religion, packaged by Playboy, blamed by mythology or contained by a chastity belt.
It can be sensual. Cerebral. Curious. Contradictory. Complicated. Funny. Powerful. 
And entirely her own.
​
Good luck putting that back in the bottle.

Cocooned within her snakeskin coverings, she sleeps. And dreams.
Within her lies great potential—ideas not yet spoken, talents not yet tested, desires not yet dared.
But leaving her cocoon has consequences.
The world beyond is uncertain. Exposure brings both possibility and vulnerability.
Is she peaceful in her waiting? Or simply oblivious?

Extraction is painful.
And yet, once freed...
Oh, how they glow!

We have all been here, wrapped in the comfort of what we know, wondering if we are ready to shed our skin. 

​Is there a particular age when it's too soon to reflect upon the past…
or too late to imagine the future? 
​
Lately, as I approach the Autumn of my life, I've been wondering about that.
Does every season bring its own crossroad?
​
The young imagine endless futures.
​The old revisit familiar roads. 

Artists, I think, do both —looking backward while  seeking the  bend ahead.

Recently I revisited a group of sculptures I’d created a quarter century ago.
The Goddess Series, created sometime during the middle of my own Summer, sculpted in clay and embellished with low-fire glazes, metallic leaf, pearls, and semiprecious stones, each figure stands about fifteen inches tall. 

​I can still remember the moment my Muse tapped me on the shoulder.

"Got an idea," she said.
​
She suggested I think about becoming.
Not success.
Not achievement.
​
Becoming.

Reflecting on how Winter becomes a season of waiting, dreaming, and holding beneath the surface the seeds of what will come. ​

Considering how Spring arrives with its awkward grace—discovering, testing limits, and bumping into boundaries. ​

​Ruminating on how Summer brings its own adventures: responsibility, family, work, love, strength, and the delightful illusion that we might someday have everything under control.

Then comes Autumn.
Not as an ending, but as another beginning.

A season of shedding old skins, loosening the grip of impossible expectations, and gradually discovering that authenticity is a far more comfortable garment.

Over the coming weeks, I'd like to introduce you to each goddess.
Not as an exhibition.
More like a reunion.

Even after a quarter of a century, I don't believe we're finished.
​We're becoming.

What brought them together isn’t nearly so important as how far they traveled.
Although neither of them knew it at the time, they shared the same beginning. Commercially spawned, hatched, and raised, their only memories were narrow and long. Perhaps this is how they learned that the only way to experience life was  swimming forward.

On the day they were released with their countless fingerling siblings they learned there were no more boundaries. 

​He dreamed of swimming to Alaska.

​She yearned for whatever lay around the next bend. 

​He always swam in a straight line. With determination. With purpose. No deviations. No wasted energy.
​
​She swam everywhere.

 Sometimes in the deep, cool pools. ​

Sometimes through the treacherous shallows. ​

​When spawning season came, he said to her, “Come swim with me.”

So she did. ​

​After that first spawning. something shifted.
Not between them.
But within him.

“If even two of our fry turn out to be decent fingerlings, it will be a miracle,” he would say.
“I’ve laid three to five thousand eggs,” she would reply. “The odds are in our favor.”

When they came to their third spawning  he announced, “I’m tired."
​
Even though she wasn’t tired at all, she swam by his side.

​They spawned again.
And again.
Even though their scales lost some of their shine.
And their bodies carried the memory of every waterway.

​“Before we fall apart we should let the bears get us, " he liked to say, 
“Contemplating sushi-side again?” she would reply.
“Spawning is too much work,” he would say. “So much swimming.”

During those conversations she would allow the water carry her for a while because, she realized, the current felt gentler now. It no longer rushed around rocks the way it had when they were young. It simply found a way through. 

​One morning he stopped swimming.

She nudged him toward the shallows where the water was warmer and the sunlight reached the bottom.​

​“I want to stop,” he said.

​She rested beside him as dragonflies stitch blue threads through the air and he settled into the shadows beneath the water.
Finally he asked,
“Was it enough?”
​
She considered where  the water had  taken them.

The ridiculous arguments over which way the current ought to be taken. Which tributary to follow. 
​​
​The years she’d spent swimming beside someone who could only imagine straight lines    

and ​moonlight,

​“Yes,” she said. “I had adventures, too.”
​
When the bear finally came, she slipped quietly into deeper water.
Not to save herself.
Only to give him the dignity of choosing his own ending.

The river carried what remained downstream.
As rivers always do.

​Days later, she found herself swimming alone for the first time in many seasons.
It was strange.
She still drifted toward the sunny places.
Still breached the surface now and then.
Still marveled that the light could scatter itself into a thousand pieces across the water.
She had once believed love meant swimming side by side forever.
Now she understood.
Love was about  water traveled  together.
That which dissolves almost everything
leaving gratitude behind.

​Every finished piece of art leaves detritus in its wake.
Abandoned canvases turned toward the wall. Clay sculptures cracked in the kiln. Sterling silver reduced to a puddle beneath the torch. Hopeful beginnings, countless hours, costly materials…

As artist we eventually learn. Failure isn't waste. It's simply the cost of tuition.

For every fused glass platter I complete, there's a pile of offcuts, slivers, shards, and odd little shapes left behind. It's much like sewing. Once a garment is cut from the fabric, scraps and selvage remain. Once upon a time, I repurposed those as clothes for my dolls.
Which started a 'pattern'.
I've collected 'leftovers' ever since.

Glass artists have an advantage.
The medium invites second chances.
​Thanks to my offcuts, slivers, shards, and odd little shapes… 

​I call them the Bird's Nest Series because that's essentially how they're constructed. Like a magpie gathering twigs, feathers, string, and whatever else catches its eye, I layer dozens of unrelated fragments into a loose, seemingly chaotic pile. ​

​Then comes the magic.

​The stack is heated slowly in the kiln until it reaches nearly 1,500°F. At that temperature the glass begins to soften—not enough to lose its individual character, but enough for neighboring pieces to connect. Glass artists call this a tack fuse. The fragments remain distinct, preserving their textures, edges, and those wonderful lace-like openings, while becoming one solid piece.
At nearly 1,500 degrees, hundreds of unrelated fragments stop thinking of themselves as scraps and begin behaving like a community. Edges soften. Colors mingle. Negative spaces emerge.

After cooling—slowly and deliberately over many hours to relieve internal stress—the piece returns to the kiln for a second firing. This time, it rests on a ceramic mold and is heated to around 1,200–1,250°F, just enough to let gravity do the work. Over the course of another firing cycle, the glass slumps into the mold, while retaining all of its airy complexity.The spaces where there isn't glass become just as important as the places where there is. Light streams through the openings, changing the piece throughout the day. The absence becomes part of the design.

​

​My dear friend and mentor Dianne van der Carr—known affectionately in our circle as Glass Guru / Silica Sensei—has a saying:
"Never refuse to re-(f)use."

​Words which caused me to ponder: aren’t, sometimes, the most beautiful things born from leftovers, false starts, broken plans, and fragments that seemed to have outlived their ​usefulness?

After shaping the bezel and soldering it to 24 gage sterling sheet,  which was was drilled and scored...

To accommodate  the  jeweler's saw... being careful not to slice fingertips!

Huzzah!

In the end, that tiny sliver of beach glass found a second life, cradled in sterling and ready to 'hang'.
It's a nice reminder that sometimes the most remarkable treasures are the ones a child notices when the rest of us are focused on something 'bigger'.


My payment?
​A  client-crafted one of a kind friendship bracelet!
How's that for compensation?