This series begins with a simple impulse found in every landscape I love: the urge to stack stones. In California, Arizona and Utah, it’s the quiet cairns that mark a trail without disturbing it, or the assemblies you find on rocky beaches anywhere in the world. All hold a kind of stillness that feels deliberate yet ephemeral - an earned equilibrium. That search for balance is the core of Form/Chance.

Each “rock” starts through a different ceramic method—hand-built or slab-built forms, extruded shapes, or thrown pieces that I then alter. Every technique introduces its own logic and limits, and I work each one until the clay begins to assert its direction. The shape is not invented so much as revealed.

When these forms come together, the act of stacking becomes a kind of negotiation: testing how weight meets weight, where tension settles, and when a composition feels inevitable. I refuse symmetry when it feels decorative, allow it when it feels true. My background in graphic design gives the stacks their chromatic clarity—controlled palettes, saturated accents, and quiet contrasts that bring a contemporary precision to these ancient references.

What emerges are sculptures that echo natural structures without imitating them—objects that hold presence, orientation, and a sense of place. Each piece is a moment of balance made visible, a record of intuition and adjustment, of form meeting chance in real time.