Neptune
Depth
Neptune began as the Moon.
Or, more accurately, as my first attempt at sculpting the Moon.
The sculpted face had made it through the kiln, but the glaze hadn't done what I expected. Instead of the pale lunar surface I had imagined, it came out brown and crawled in places, leaving patches of bare clay. It wasn't my Moon*. So I put it aside.
It sat on a shelf in my studio for a few weeks, alongside failed Suns, Venuses, and more learning-curve casualties than I ever kept count of.
By the time I was ready to make Neptune, I already knew I didn't want it to be predictably about water. I was more interested in what might be down there, what exists whether we see it or not. So when I looked at that brown face again, I saw it differently. The crawled, mottled glaze reminded me of an old brown catfish that had been lurking at the bottom of a river for a very long time. The eyes were closed, as if looking at something deep within.
They came out of the kiln white, and I painted them to mirror the skeletons of ancient sea creatures. I arranged them around the mottled face, then continued outward in stained glass chosen to bridge the brown of the face and the blue grout it's suspended in.
That's when I saw something I hadn't planned. The creatures made the face look deeply contained, as though Neptune were sitting well below the surface, embedded in an underground world.
Beneath the surface
The face that had failed at being the Moon found its place surrounded by things that normally remain hidden. Even the glaze that had once seemed so wrong belonged here.
Depth, it turned out, is what exists beneath the visible surface: the parts of ourselves that aren't immediately accessible, tidy, or easily explained.
*The Moon did get made, eventually, but with a different face.
Existing Architectures
Once I decided this abandoned Moon could become Neptune, I went all in. I began researching life deep underwater and discovered radiolarians: tiny organisms with amazingly intricate skeletal forms, invisible to the naked eye. Whole architectures that exist whether or not anyone looks for them. They led me further into the strange shapes of life in the deep, small and hidden. I started sculpting my own collection of such creatures and organic forms. I didn't know yet how they would fit. I just kept making them.