Unboxing

May 5, 2026

Dear Studio Friends,

I hope those of you in northern areas are well into spring by now.

This past month was a full one — family visited, I gave a public talk, and a long-awaited sculpture finally came together.

Among other activities while they were here, I dragged my family to the International UFO Museum. It was an experience. 👽

I gave a talk on my work to students, faculty, fellow resident artists, and other visitors at Eastern New Mexico University's Roswell campus. Many thanks to ENMUR and RAiR for organizing this series — the questions from the audience were so thoughtful, and it meant a lot to have the chance to share the work.

The most recent sculpture in the Unconformity series, Sixteenth, has been completed. This piece has been a long time in the making — I started investigating the idea of integrating a cast glass component a few years ago, and through a lot of testing, trials, errors, and guidance from very generous people, it finally exists. Stay tuned for more documentation of the finished piece. Click on the image below for a quick video of the wood forms being removed from the freshly cast concrete sculpture. The blue horizontal bar is kiln-cast glass — cast separately, then set into the mold mid-pour, with concrete cast below and above it.

Along with other ongoing projects, I'm gearing up for some brickmaking. Using a traditional New England water-struck technique — where water is used as a release agent — and a local New Mexico clay mined near Albuquerque, I'll be casting some very strangely shaped bricks. The molds are made of wood (see below), and wet, goopy clay will be thrown in to form each brick. More on that next month!

Thank you for joining me.

More soon,

~Lydia