Little white birds called fairy terns lived in the trees behind my childhood home. My parents would point them out, swooping back and forth beyond our roof in twos and threes, like tiny guardians of this place that was their home and ours. When my mother was nearing the end of her life we would sit outside together and she would still search the sky and point out the fairy terns to me. They are integrally woven into my memories of that house and my family. Fairy terns lay their one egg on a branch without a nest, an apt metaphor for the precariousness of home and family. 

A blown glass keepsake in theh shape of an egg perches on the edge of a brach. The uneven glass warps the view of a porcelain doll head inside. The branch, something that is an intrinsically vulnerable material, is cast into an enduring solid bronze, memorializing what no longer exists and alluding to the desire to make permanent that which is fleeting. This heavy bronze branch is balanced in a loop of rope that extends to the ceiling and then down to wrap around a large rock as a counterweight. The rope has been reverently hand-coiled. In a form of ritual, twine has been methodically wrapped around ash from my burned family home. This wrapping is an effort in holding, keeping, preserving the past, that is tied to a solid weight of the present.