INLETS: alchemizing homesickness into belonging through new ceramic homeware collection

Homesickness has haunted me since I was a small child. Most of my life, I explained that ache in my chest and the deep empty longing… as a wish to return to the place my family and I left was when I was five years old.

As I grew older, it began to feel like a wish for a family that knew how to love me.

As an adult, I learned that this feeling of homesickness is something many of us share. Why?

Some of us are complex creatures, full of nuance and contradiction. And so we don’t fully belong anywhere. When we are in one place, or with one group of people… only part of us feels seen. We rarely feel seen or understood in our entirety.

This, I believe, is the longing to belong so many of us experience as relentless homesickness. It isn’t about our homes. But also… it is.

The physical space we inhabit can become an extension of our body and our inner world, reflecting back our identity, values, and experience. It can also express that reality to others, so that we feel seen and understood in all of our complexity.

So, for many of us, the remedy becomes intention and ritual around domestic life.

In designing this new collection, my intention was to create functional art objects that made people feel more at home in their space and with the people around them. I started by anchoring into my own personal contradictions around home and belonging: I am deeply rooted in the Pacific Northwest and in the Mid Atlantic. Whichever of the two places I am in, part of me is always reaching for the other. Both of these places feel like home to me for the same reason though. They are lush, gentle resting places, tucked next to inlets. The Puget Sound and the Chesapeake Bay are cozy nooks where we get to access the abundance and possibility of the ocean, without its harshness.

I asked myself what a sense of arrival would feel like? What if the sense of longing, reaching, wishing wasn’t there? What would take its place? And like most things I trust, the answer wasn’t intellectual or emotional, it was kinesthetic. I had a felt sense of what was underneath the push and pull.

It was the exact same push and pull, but with a very different vibe.

It shifted from a polarity or an inner conflict into ocean waves, undulation, inhaling and exhaling, my own vitality.

The longing to belong, the reaching for one coast and then the other… has been my ebb and flow. And it can continue to be, without the pain or the pressure.

I felt an invitation to surrender to it, to allow that push and pull to be joyful and to find a sense of arrival within its dynamics. It’s like I had been watching the tide go out, wishing it would come in and then watching it come in and wishing it would go out.

With this new insight, I felt a new relationship to all of my personal contradictions. Like, the dynamic tension they create is actually what gives me life.

I translated this into the forms in this collection in a number of ways. First, literally, by embracing the sealife forms that are familiar in the Chesapeake Bay and Puget Sound. Second, by reimagining those forms ever so slightly, so that when we touch the object, our body experiences new possibilities outside of restrictive habitual thinking. Third, by bridging the material world and the inner world. I want this collection to reflect back to people the parts of themselves that rarely feel seen or understood. I want these objects to make you feel more yourself, more loved, more able to express your wholeness. So, some of the work is a little weird! You might look at something and judge it or want to make fun of it… which touches on how we get edited when we try to show up authentically in this world.

The final pieces in this new collection are in the kiln. And I cannot wait to share it all with you very soon.