After the install, the real work begins

Hello Reader,

After the install, the real work begins

This has been a full month.

The kind of month where the work stretches across everything, finishing pieces, installing the Ceramics x Fiber exhibition, documenting, sharing, writing, showing up, and holding the business side of a working studio practice together. All of it is happening at once.

That’s the part people don’t always see. The work isn’t just what’s on the wall. It’s the systems behind it. The decisions. The pacing. The ability to move between making, presenting, and sustaining the practice itself.

The Ceramics x Fiber exhibition comes down on Sunday, March 29.

There’s always a quiet shift when an exhibition closes. The work leaves the space, and what remains is the studio again clear, open, waiting.

I’ll be stepping away for a few weeks after the deinstall. Rest is part of the work. Space is part of the work. It’s how the next phase begins.

Because what’s next is not another piece. It’s a body of work.

What the Work Is Becoming

This year, I made a decision to move differently to focus on building a cohesive body of work rather than working piece by piece.

That shift has changed how I’m approaching the studio.

Right now, the work is being shaped through research and memory. I’ve been going through family documents, tracing lineage, and building out a family tree. At the same time, I’m returning to place, revisiting memories tied to my father’s hometown in Trenton, Tennessee, and my mother’s paternal side in Cullowhee, North Carolina.

These aren’t just references. They’re the source material.

What I’m interested in is how memory, land, and inherited experience can live inside the work, not as illustration, but as structure. As something embedded. Something felt.

The studio is becoming a site of excavation. Of translation.

Fiber, paper, and form will carry these stories forward, holding fragments of history, gestures of care, and the quiet weight of what has been passed down.

This next body of work will take its time. It’s meant to.

Where This Leads

Right now, I’m less interested in producing quickly and more focused on building something that holds.

Something cohesive.
Something intentional.
Something that can live in conversation beyond a single exhibition.

The work is shifting from individual pieces toward a larger, sustained language.

And that’s where my attention is.

What’s Ahead

• Ceramics x Fiber Exhibition
  ​ On view through March 29, 2026
• Studio Pause
  ​ A few weeks of rest and reset before beginning the next body of work
• In Development
  ​ A new body of work rooted in family history, land, and memory

There’s more coming.
I’ll share as it unfolds.

Lisa

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