On Adornment: Leopold Finds a Home

What I love most is when a new caretaker of one of the Guardian Monsters from my studio shares an at-home installation. Seeing these creatures settle into the ecosystems people have built around themselves always tells me something about both the object and the person who chose it.

When Leopold’s caretaker sent this photo, I immediately noticed the company he keeps: a small woodcut, a sacred heart, a growing constellation of chosen objects filling the wall little by little. Leopold found a good home.

Ceramics, as a field, is full of conversations about the sacredness of functionality, and I happily jump onto that philosophical bandwagon with everyone else. But I’m equally interested in the sacredness of adornment, the objects we choose to live beside simply because they help us feel more fully ourselves.

In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard writes about houses as containers of memory and symbolic attachment, places where humans create psychic belonging. In sharp contrast, architect Adolf Loos famously declared, “The evolution of culture is synonymous with the removal of ornament,” though even he surrounded himself with luxurious materials and carefully chosen objects. Somewhere along the way, adornment itself became moralized: minimalism framed as purity and restraint, maximalism as excess. But I don’t believe objects themselves possess morality.

If you’ve ever been to my home or studio, you already know where I fall on the spectrum. I want to see the objects and images I’ve chosen to live with. I don’t rotate collections or tuck things away for the sake of visual quiet. The adornment is the seat of my power.

That doesn’t mean accumulation without discernment. Even in a maximalist home, culling matters. Editing matters. The breaking point comes when objects begin to burden the mind rather than nourish it, and that threshold is different for every person. Healthy ecosystems require tending.

What moved me most about this installation is the way Leopold entered into relationship with the other objects already living there. He now hangs beside a sacred heart, becoming part of a small domestic altar of affection, protection, memory, and humor.

Leopold is an aquatic llama, ready to carry you below the surface and into the depths of your soul so you can uncover the treasures that have lived inside your heart all along. He will be your one true aqua llama, and he’ll spit at any nuisance that isn’t worth your time. He's ride-or-die like that.

And honestly, it feels entirely appropriate that he watches over the liquor cabinet, because he’s a little saucy too.