Before the school closed due to the virus, I was interested in the constraint and growth of nature around me, and the guilt, sadness, and frustration I felt when experiencing those moments. Now that circumstances have changed, I have become more influenced by preserving those moments of constraint and growth I was interested with before, as memorializing the temporariness of this time. How can I preserve a time that is uncertain and temporal?

The best way that I can think to do this is to make something permanent and hard to move; something that can sustain the storm; something weighted and compressed. Creating an object that pays homage to a passing time that seems that it will influence the rest of forever. By creating marble tables that belong to one place gives me hope for stability, respecting fragility and to create a memorial culture for things that I often find are quickly overlooked, unfamiliar and curious.

When I go about my day I am attracted to little things, finding joy in moments that are often overlooked. A sprout growing out of the concrete, so strong and bold. A ribbon tied to a gate, left over from the holidays, forgotten. A poor attempt to fix a hole in a chain link fence. All these occurrences are sad but at the same time thoughtful.
We, personally and as a community, sometimes rely on tangible objects to call up memories. The tables are a tangible emblem that travel between past and present allowing me to go back and forth more fluidly.

Marble takes upward of 75 million years to form. It is mined from its place of comfort and growth. Digging out this beautiful material from deep in the earth is uncomfortable and sad for me to think about sometimes. Seeing something so beautiful that the earth never intended for us to see breaks my heart a little bit because I feel like its true, million year old, weighted and compressed beauty is lost.

I coincidentally went to a marble cutter around the time I started to think about what and how I was going to make for my final project with being confined to the resources in my house. As my location changed to living at home, so did my thoughts about this project.
Marble is an extremely beautiful material, but I have never thought of using it until now because the preciousness of it frightened me. But I kept thinking that this would be the perfect material to use to express my ideas. The marble slabs that I am using are offcuts from my mother’s new house that is under construction so that makes me a little less nervous to use the material as it would be discarded if I don’t use it. I will only use these ‘leftovers’ bits to create a series of tables. These tables will be designed by slot joining each piece of marble together. Each part of the table is standing only because the other pieces are working to hold one another up. Each part in notch’d together, the joint is a perfect fit to not let the parts slip.

A daunting time, like now, has the power to influence how we will live the rest of forever. Having an object that is an emblem of this time is acting as a place to return to as a reminder on how to move forward. These tables are not only an heirloom for stability in a time of unknowing but also a reminder to cherish the earth’s strengths. Morning over the current situation will foster excitement, hope and motivation to do the best that we can in the future. I hope that we can blossom for another million years and the stone will be the witness to this transformation.

I want to have an emblem of a time that was uncertain, hurtful and confusing, to remind myself that it might happen again, and remember the person I would like to grow to be. Maybe the tables I make will go to friends and family, all connected by this one stone that has started a new life in new places, but each table shares the same history and will think of its companions often, like I do my friends and family, in this time of separation.