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. (The Moon did get made, eventually, with a different face.)
So I put it aside.
Later, when it was time to create Neptune, i looked at it again and I saw it differently. The mottled brown surface that had looked so wrong before suddenly had possibilities. The closed eyes looking within at the deepest parts of an interior world. Depth is what exists beneath the visible surface: the parts of ourselves that aren't immediately accessible, tidy, or easily explained.
The Trickster Emerges
Beneath the Surface
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.
When they emerged from the kiln, I arranged them around the mottled face and built outward with glass. I noticed how the creatures surrounding the face made it look deeply contained, as though Neptune was sitting well below the surface, embedded in an underground world.
From the beginning, I didn't want Neptune to be predictably about water. I wanted it to be about depth: not the water itself, but what might be down there.
Instead of looking at the surface, I delved beneath it.
The face i made that failed at being one thing became something stranger. I now surrounded it with Intricate forms. Creatures that exist unseen yet surround the parts of us that live beneath the surface. Feelings with long histories, knowing that arrives without deliberate thought, and things we may never fully understand, don't appear because we decide to make them. They rise when we are still.