Mercury
Transformation
I had a very different idea for Mercury's hair when I started. But the epoxy clay I was using to sculpt it turned out to be floppier than I expected and simply wouldn't behave the way I had imagined. I could have switched materials. Instead, stubbornly, I stuck with the epoxy clay and let the design change instead.
The Trickster Emerges
Chaos Unraveled
The result was a mass of loose, twisting coils—fluid, unruly and much more interesting than what I had planned. But the coils didn't stay tangled. As I worked outward from the sculpted hair into the mosaic, the loops began to straighten. For some strange reason, old-school Morse code popped into my head, and—similar to its series of long and short pulses—I found myself laying long and short tesserae where the coils would have kept curling. The dark ceramic profile gave way to epoxy clay and then glass, the background moved from black through copper into silver, and the tangle straightened out along with it.
As all of this came together, Mercury himself came into focus—clever, unconventional and a little mischievous. A trickster. Perfectly capable of following the rules, but more interested in finding another way.
I'd planned the nose piercing from the beginning, without knowing then how right it would turn out to be. I originally sculpted it in clay, but it cracked off during firing. I replaced it with bent 8-gauge wire, which worked better anyway.
Transformation Transforming
I started this piece thinking about transformation. Somewhere along the way, I ended up experiencing it. The material changed the direction of the work, I changed with it, and Mercury became something I hadn't anticipated.