When the Work Leaves Home

The Realization heads west—from my Indiana studio to the Haggin Museum in Stockton, California.

There is a strange part of making art that I hadn’t really thought about until recently: eventually, the work leaves.

For weeks or months, a piece lives with me. I find the objects, move them around, change my mind, take things apart, put them back together. Eventually all those unrelated little pieces become something with a life of its own.

And then, for a while, it just lives here.

I walk past it. I photograph it. It becomes part of the studio.

Then someone, somewhere I’ve never been, sees it and says, yes, we’d like that one.

And suddenly I’m building a shipping box.

The Realization has made its way from Indiana to Stockton, California, where it will be included in the Stockton Art League’s 63rd National Juried Exhibition at the Haggin Museum.

That still feels a little bizarre.

There is also something wonderfully appropriate about this particular piece being the one making the trip.

At the center of The Realization is an elephant tethered by a chain. The piece grew from the familiar story of an elephant that has been restrained for so long that eventually it stops testing the restraint. Even when it becomes strong enough to walk away, it remains because it has learned to believe that it cannot.

What interested me most was the moment when that belief changes.

Maybe this isn’t holding me anymore.

I think most of us collect invisible tethers over time—expectations, fears, old stories, assumptions about who we are and what we’re capable of.

When I made the piece, I certainly wasn’t thinking about California.

Yet here is this little elephant, heading west.

Packing artwork for an exhibition is an unexpectedly strange experience. I know every object in the piece. I know what is attached to what, which parts gave me trouble, and the decisions that eventually made everything fall into place.

Then I wrap it carefully, close the box, and hand it over.

After spending so much time deciding exactly where every tiny thing belongs, suddenly I have absolutely no control over it at all.

It goes onto a truck. It crosses the country. Someone else opens the box. Someone else installs it. And eventually, people I will never meet will stand in front of it and have their own experience with it.

I'm beginning to realize that finishing a piece isn't necessarily the end of its story.

Sometimes it's the point where the story stops belonging entirely to me.

So sitting somewhere in California now is a box containing a small elephant, a star-covered ball, an old wooden spool, some chains, bits of discarded paper—and quite a lot of my heart.

Heading west.

Maybe The Realization had one more thing to teach me after all.

Sometimes you make something.

And then you let it go.