Magma Fauna Ceramic Planters

In January 2024, I launched a series of hand-sculpted ceramic planters, called Magma Fauna.

Magma – molten rock material within the earth – Fauna – the animals characteristic of a special environment.

merriam-webster

I see each Magma Fauna horse as a love letter to Minka – the beautiful, flighty horse with whom I went spooking, lurching, and bolting through my teenage years. Minka and I were a pair; both particularly anxious and perilously green – but my awareness of the peril we courted was eclipsed by my abiding love for her. When I wasn’t out exploring with Minka, I was grooming, drawing, talking, or writing stories about her. Because my love for her existed at the nexus of childhood and teenhood – it was laced with a potency that only horse kids know. At any rate, the memory of that love underpins each Magma Fauna horse. The prominence that Minka held in my early life meant that every whorl*, muscle group and skeletal trace was learned like an alphabet. Each Magma Fauna Horse then, transcribes a girl’s memory of a horse whom she was priveleged to know.

* A swirl, or whorl, is a distinctive pattern in the lay of hair on the horse. Though they can be found anywhere on the horse’s body, it is believed that there is a meaning behind the whorl on a horse’s head.