Smelling my grandma’s dirt floor basement, shaping the mud I pulled from the creek’s bank and, of course, building sand castles with the warm sun at my back, has feed my artistic being. Clay nurtures my love of shape and my earth connection. Life’s transitory nature, lessons of defeat and destruction, replicates itself in clay work. “Let go of expected outcomes,” clay says; she gives me courage to go forward again and again with new perspective.