It’s
been 30 years since I moved to Tennessee to go to
college--and the older I get, the more resonance my
childhood home in Florida has for me. I grew up on the
Apollo-age Space Coast, where the people were a sometimes
dissonant mix--the rural descendants of pioneers chafing
against the government-operated space agency and the upstart
engineers and technologists moving in to get those first men
on the moon. The house I grew up in was already more than
100 years old when I was a child, and it was the only
library for miles around, built in the days before roads,
when people poled their boats up and down the Indian River.
Our neighbors, by contrast, all lived in pastel-pretty
cinderblock houses built quickly and cheaply and recently to
accommodate the influx of newcomers. So I’m familiar with
the old and new – and pretty comfortable with it. “My Old
Florida Home” is mostly a mix of classic shapes glazed and
carved in colors and textures that suggest the sub-tropics,
as well as the old and weathered, the salt-beaten and
hurricane-battered exteriors I grew up with on the
Intracoastal Waterway. But there’s also the occasional
spotlight sculpture in this series. These pieces speak to me
of marine life: They’re curvy and soft around the edges, as
water-worn things often are, having been tumbled end over
end, year after year, across the sandy ocean floor.
