I built this house the way a tree builds itself — one ring at a time, each one marking a year the structure held. But trees don't stop at their own edges, and neither do the rings on this piece. They cross the corners of the house and keep going, wrapping from wall to wall like the growth never noticed it was supposed to stop at a seam.

Then, in two places, the rings break open.

I didn't plan the breaks as symmetry or as decoration. They happened where the form asked for them — the tree rings pushing outward until the surface gave way, leaving two openings straight up to the sky. A house that grew itself a roof and then grew past it.This piece sits inside my House Series, where I've been working through what shelter means when you're isolated inside it, a set of ideas that started forming during COVID and hasn't fully let go of me since.

A house is supposed to be the thing that keeps weather out. This one doesn't. The openings aren't damage; they're the logical end of the same growth that built the walls. Shelter and exposure made from the same material, the same rings, the same hands.Black clay under white slip means the rings read almost like scar tissue — pale lines over dark ground, visible from across a room. Up close, the texture does something different: it stops looking architectural and starts looking biological, like something that was alive before it was a house.I keep coming back to trees in this work — growth, mortality, the record a living thing leaves of its own time.

Unsheltered is where that language finally met the House Series head-on: a structure built entirely out of the evidence of its own growing, cracking open under the weight of it.