Weight Distribution

The new school year started this week. Another summer somehow disappeared, and everything is moving again. Students are back, the studios are filling up, and the pace of everyday life has picked up almost immediately.

I finished a new piece this week titled Weight Distribution, part of the ongoing body of work I’ve been calling Stability Tests.

The piece consists of two ceramic sawhorses supporting a long, solid bar of clear glass. The ceramic was built and surfaced to resemble worn wood—scarred, imperfect, and seemingly used for years. Between them sits the glass: heavy, transparent, and rigid, but twisted through its center.

I’ve been thinking a lot about weight lately—not necessarily physical weight, but the accumulation of responsibilities, relationships, work, kids, and time. There is always something being carried, and rarely by one thing alone.

That’s what interests me about the sawhorse. It’s an incredibly ordinary object whose entire purpose is to support something else. We rarely pay attention to it unless it fails.

The glass changes that relationship. Its weight is shared between two separate structures, while the twist in the center introduces tension and movement into something that would otherwise be a simple beam. Nothing is perfectly aligned, yet everything continues to hold.

As I get older, I’m becoming more aware of how quickly time moves. Life doesn’t seem to become less complicated; you just keep adjusting to what gets added. Maybe stability has less to do with reaching some fixed or comfortable place and more to do with continually redistributing the weight.

Weight Distribution is another test of that idea: two structures, one shared load, and the effort required to keep something important off the ground.