Jupiter
Expansion
Jupiter began as a whole head. After I sculpted it, I deliberately split the top open.
I knew I wanted something to emerge from that opening, but I didn't know exactly what. Since Jupiter represents Expansion, I started making exclamation marks—some from epoxy clay, others from ceramic clay that I could bend and distort. I imagined them bursting from the head and continuing outward into the mosaic.
I’d been making a picture of expansion. What I actually wanted was for the materials to expand out of one another.
My original idea wasn’t wrong. I just followed it far enough to discover the better one hiding inside it.
A whole form splits open. Matter emerges. Matter becomes glass. A few tesserae become many. Chaos moves toward order as it expands outward, until what began inside becomes the world around him.
That became Jupiter.
Still too many.
Down to one.
I made a lot of them.
And then I started taking them away.
Once I could see everything together, I realized the exclamation marks were telling the viewer about expansion instead of letting the piece actually do it. The more interesting idea was already happening in the materials themselves: orange epoxy clay pushing up through the opening, and glass beginning to spread out from it.
So most of the exclamation marks disappeared. I kept one—not as the idea itself, but almost as punctuation.