"mo(u)rning cup"; 2026; bisque-fired clay, paper, school glue, ink; papier-mâché; 3.5 X 3.25 X 4.5 in
A graduate of UCLA’s Film School, AM is an award-winning Screenwriter and Experimental Filmmaker and an acclaimed Theatre Director. After a decade of working professionally as a Production Designer, AM forsook Hollywood and moved to a remote fishing village in Mexico. The restrictions of her new setting led AM to explore different disciplines, both ancient and emergent.
Infinitely curious and stubbornly autodidactic, AM has taken self-sponsored sabbaticals in an artist colony in Central Mexico, the metropolises of New York City, Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Lima and, ultimately, New Orleans. This vibrant, gurgling vortex of creativity inspired her to play with interactive projects, street art pieces and conceptual art. In 2010, she found a Creole cottage on the verge of collapse. Using skills learned from her Carpenter father, AM did much of the renovation with her own hands as her home's rebirth became her passion project.
Beginning when she was three years old, AM rose at 4am each morning to drink coffee with her father before he left for work. Her submitted piece, "mo(u)rning cup", is a ceramic negative of her child-sized mug used during this daily ritual, carried with her throughout her lifetime.
The work incorporates a letter AM wrote to her father, now deceased, about the joy and significance of those mornings together. She tore the letter by hand and distributed fragments throughout the clay before firing, embedding the words within the form like confetti. The paper weakened the clay, creating defects, and pieces fell away. Remaining fragments of the letter were papier-mached to mend the damage.
It was intentionally only bisque-fired to transform the vessel into a meditation on remembrance's instability and vulnerability. Like memory itself, "mo(u)rning cup" refracts the experience and acknowledges that it can never be fully resurrected. What remains is continually reassembled, fragmented and illusory.
@why.iamyounique
