Tangled Reflections

Every mirror holds two worlds. The world in front of it — you, the room, the light coming through the window — and the world behind the silvered glass, which is identical to the first world and utterly unlike it: reversed, cooler, inhabited by something that has your face but not your intention. I am drawn to mirrors for this reason. They are portals that require nothing of you except your presence. You walk up to one and it shows you back to yourself, faithfully, with no opinion at all.

The oval is the most intimate of mirror shapes. It fits the human form without forcing it — no hard corners to cut off the head or the feet, just a gentle ellipse that holds whatever stands before it in a kind of embrace. I chose this form deliberately for Tangled Reflections because I wanted the frame to feel like a garland rather than a cage: an accumulation of the tide's generosity, heaped up around the glass as a gift.

The materials came from a single morning's walk after an overnight storm — sea grapes still clustered and moist, kelp laid in generous ropes, small driftwood fragments polished to smoothness by weeks of water and sand. I arranged them without plan, following the shape the wreath wanted to take, trusting the tide's own sense of composition. No two pieces in the frame are alike; the whole structure holds together through a kind of accumulated accident that I am not entirely responsible for.

Tangled Reflections has been called home by a collector in the Pacific Northwest, where the glass now reflects a room full of grey winter light and the sound of rain. That seems exactly right to me. Exactly where it wanted to be.