So I have two buildings in Talent.

One is one hundred eleven Talent Avenue, where we had a business for thirty years, a pottery supply business.

About a four thousand square foot building, good amount of space.

The other building I have is actually on the historic register.

It's called Hanscom Hall.

The front of the building became gallery space.

The rest of it was workshop space.

It was the first building in talent to be on the historic register.

First time I'd ever had a storefront, so that made it extra special too.

You know, having a studio in the historic district of Ashland, what a gift.

That was that window when COVID was looming.

Slowly, the things we knew that were happening then needed to kind of diminish.

We had to let go of things.

And so in addition to other big changes, I realized that workshops were going away and I would need to close that studio because it was time to figure out what the next part of my life was going be about.

So, you know, I moved home.

Then I had this really special collection of things that I knew were something I really needed to hold close to me.

So I set up a space at home, kind of settling into that and making things and watching the, you know, the summer had come and gone.

And and then that other big thing happened.

At the Alameda fire raged through the night of September eighth, I found myself totally disoriented by the film of the fire until I saw the image of the garage.

But as sure as the sun will rise, many of us made our way back into town to find the mongering garage surrounded by bubble and devastation, but standing tall like When the Alnida fire ripped through our community, it changed all of our lives.

There was this incredible photograph of this building completely engulfed in flame.

And all you could see was the stepped as a shadow line against all of the flames.

That's the identity of this building.

It's called a stepped parapet.

Just looking at the pieces of metal that were coming off the building when we were having it cleaned up after the fire, and the metal was just so amazing.

The textures and the colors and each piece was different.

Different.

It just made good sense to repeat that shape as a way to honor the building.

So a friend of mine has a plasma torch cutter, So I was able to go over to her studio and make these cut out shapes out of these really long pieces of metal that are probably eight feet long and about a foot wide.

Well, in an inspiration, I mean, the building burn and just all the fire marks that were left on the building and on the metal.

It really changed the way I started working in clay.

So that really inspired me to start working with these are called Sager fired pots.

One of the things I like about it is I I really don't have a lot of control.

I try to create a surface by using certain chemicals, copper wire and and other things that we know are gonna make a pattern in the clay.

But I don't really have any control about it.

This is a, some copper wire that leaves a a really nice line mark.

Then I'll plan it all out, but then when I put it into the kiln, get it up to temperature, it's always a total surprise as how it all comes out.

It was a profound breathtaking moment.

I had literally what I was wearing on that day when I jumped in my car and drove away, and nothing else survived.

And so my whole life's work was gone, and there I was trying to figure out how to find myself.

I feel like I need to redesign my life.

I think there's such a tendency to feel like I want what's familiar.

Mhmm.

We gravitate towards that.

And I just for me, going back is not going forward.

I think the response has just been wonderful.

I mean, didn't realize that so many people were needing a place to really share what they've experienced with the fire, and that seems really important to me.

The statues you're looking on the table here are the survivors.

These statues all survived the Alameda fire.

They went through the big hot heat that day.

But then this gigantic explosion happened, and everything just went black.

So metal didn't survive, but the ceramics did.

And this one had a full body.

This is about a six feet.

He was about six foot tall, this is what survived left was his face.

This book is a collection of stories about the Alameda fire.

The artwork on the cover is by a local artist named Betty Leduc, and this is part of a series of wood panels she did on the Almeda fire and just very vibrant.

You you just feel the the power of of the flames.

So I just had to keep working with that theme because it wasn't over with.

It was so many people had left with no real place to go.

So the piece kept growing and it went from the fire to the fury.

And then the last piece is finally going back and taking care of a pet, finding your cat, and the tender little things that people did to help others and to even take care of people's pets that were often lost during this turmoil and destruction.

Most of my paintings are started by sketching.

It it actually some colors showed on the side of the building, it that made a nice painting because they showed through.

My grandson, he'll be all over town in a wheelchair to these places.

And I I like this place because it was still standing.

And that's the title of my painting, they're still standing.

So what was unusual about the building is we realized pretty quickly that it was a kind of like in two dimensions, it's a trapezoid.

There were no walls that were parallel, And then we realized that the side walls, the floor was dipping from front to back eighteen inches and eighty feet.

Walls were tilted to go with the grade going to the back, which was really unusual.

We couldn't touch the front wall street facade because of the historic designation that we were seeking.

We couldn't alter those openings in any way because that's sort of the main focus of the historic.

It's the primary facade.

And then here we are standing at this cusp of the past through the present and into the future.

Think really the honoring of the art of the decay or the art of of this building going through like a a death process and then also a rebirth.

Big aspect of this project was one in such, how could we allow this building to tell its generational story across the span of the past, the present, and then what is to become its future?