Wood Burn design of an abstract squid on cedar

Squidly – Wood Burning on cedar panel

In the ancient dialogue between fire and fiber, where cedar’s patient rings whisper tales of seasons long past, “Squidly” emerges as both invocation and revelation. Here, in this communion of element and essence, heat becomes storyteller, transforming surface into sanctuary, marking time’s passage in deliberate strokes that honor both intention and material memory.

The cedar panel, itself a testament to cycles of reclamation and rebirth, offers its own narrative to this collaboration. Each growth ring becomes a line of living text, a chronicle of drought and abundance, of winters weathered and springs embraced. Against this organic manuscript, the burning tool traces new stories—its heat singing hymns of transformation as it translates fluid motion into permanent testimony.

Squidly’s form, caught between definition and suggestion, emerges through this careful choreography of char and grain. Tentacles reach across time’s texture like questions seeking ancient answers, each curve and spiral a meditation on the nature of movement itself. The wood’s natural patterns participate in this dance of becoming, grain lines flowing like currents that guided this creature’s ancestors through primordial seas.

In this marriage of technique and material, every burn mark becomes an act of reverence—a recognition that creation often dwells in the space between control and surrender. The heat’s passage leaves behind more than mere marks; it creates topography of touch and restraint, where darkness blooms like ink in water, spreading until it finds its natural boundaries in the wood’s willing embrace.

Through this process, what begins as simple design transcends into exploration of how form emerges from formlessness, how intention meets resistance and creates something greater than either could achieve alone. The squid, that philosopher of ocean depths, finds new expression in this medium of permanent flame, its essence captured not in literal translation but in the way it suggests movement even in stillness, presence even in absence.

Here, in this communion of fire and fiber, art becomes artifact becomes allegory—speaking to the way all things carry within them the potential for transformation, waiting only for the right touch, the right moment, the right convergence of elements to reveal their hidden truths.

2 prancing ponies in the wind and waves engraved tile

Prancing Ponies – Engraved Tile

In the delicate dance between artisan and element, where clay surrenders to intention and glaze transforms to permanent memory, two equine spirits emerge from the fired canvas of possibility. These prancing ponies, caught in eternal revelry, speak to the untamed heart of the Pacific Northwest—a place where the boundary between earth and sky dissolves in perpetual negotiation.

Their forms, etched with deliberate grace into the ceramic’s willing surface, capture that liminal moment between motion and stillness, where hooves seem to barely kiss the ground before lifting again into dream. The wind that carries them—rendered in sweeping lines that echo the region’s eternal atmospheric dance—becomes both medium and message, speaking of those endless conversations between storm and shore that define this corner of the world.

Here, in this fired testimony to joy’s ephemeral nature, the waves that frame these spirited creatures carry the same restless energy that eternally shapes our coastline. They curl and surge across the tile’s terrain like memories of every storm that has ever graced our shores, each line a testament to the way water writes its story upon the world—sometimes in whispers, sometimes in thunderous declarations.

The ponies themselves emerge as more than mere figures; they become avatars of that wild spirit that still runs untamed through our regional consciousness. Their manes, caught in mid-flight, mirror the way cedar boughs dance in winter gales, while their fluid forms speak to that essential freedom that resides in all things untamed and true to their nature.

In this single frame of fired clay, I’ve tried to capture something of the soul of this place—where elements conspire in endless play, where boundaries between real and mythic blur like shoreline in fog, and where every creature, whether rendered in clay or flesh, dances to rhythms as ancient as the tides themselves.