The small houses keep arriving without being invited. I think I’ve drawn them, at this point, in nearly every piece for two years — sometimes prominent, sometimes hidden where you almost have to look for them. People ask, gently, whether I’m aware that I keep putting them in. I am.
What I’m less sure of is why. The honest answer is that the studio feels safest when a small house is in the frame. The forest can be vast — and the work is often about the vastness — but a single hand-cut copper house at the edge of it changes everything. It places a person there. It says: you can live in this landscape, even if you can never own it.
For “Magic of Safety” the house is barely two centimetres across. It’s the last thing I add and the only entirely deliberate mark in the piece. The rest of the work is conversation; the house is the punctuation.
— Katherine
(Placeholder essay — to be replaced with the artist’s real letter.)
