button boxes

“Blue Box”, 2026. ceramics, thread, found-object

I have been intrigued with buttons ever since I unearthed my mother’s button collection in 2020, and I have been working with them ever since. In my artist statement for the exhibition “From many, one: The Story of Repetition” at The Parksville Museum, I write:

“My work questions our relationship to objects and the nature of the roles they play in our lives, how they witness stories and events, and how they are collected, lost, or discarded. I use time-consuming craft-based processes such as kiln-cast glass, ceramics, casting, mould-making, and sewing. As new materials are chosen, they give objects the capacity to communicate in unexpected ways, and as I make them, they become imbued with care through acts of repetition, growing louder and more present in their overabundance.  

In the button-box series, I re-create a number of saved button collections (my mother’s, my own, and discarded ones found in second-hand stores) into ceramics. Casting an object, such as a button, creates a memory of that object, and moving it into clay allows me to alter, enlarge, multiply, and fragment the original so I can reposition it as ‘an idea of a button’. I use stain to make them appear rusty and old, or colour to match the old tin they were once collected in. I change their scale, their number, and soon this profusion of items becomes more than a familiar collection: it is a metaphor for time passing, items forgotten, collected, iterated, and saved. Even the piece itself becomes a fragmented version of the past, an honouring of the sewing paraphernalia that was a necessity, and a means of preserving, repurposing, and reusing items from the home that were once carefully saved, curated, and collected by individuals.”