Sandspur

Sandspur takes its name and its form from one of Florida's most familiar and
least celebrated native plants — a low, unassuming burr that clings to bare feet on the
beach, sharp enough to be remembered, small enough to be overlooked. Rendered
here at monumental scale in sweeping aluminum blades, the sculpture reimagines that
humble form as something expansive: radiating, weightless, almost triumphant.

The piece was created during a residency in Nevada, undertaken in June — a
month I would ordinarily spend at home in Florida, near the water, with family. Working
at a distance from that place and that ritual, I found myself returning to a plant that
belongs there as plainly as I do: indigenous, resilient, easy to miss until it makes itself
known. Sandspur became a way of carrying something of home into unfamiliar ground
— not as homesickness, but as a kind of rootedness that travels.

I've deliberately left the piece open rather than tying it too tightly to its origin. Its
overlapping, curved forms suggest a sandspur's burr at the moment it might open, but
they read just as easily as a lotus in bloom, or the blades of a desert agave catching last
light — forms from entirely different landscapes that share the same architecture of
radiating growth. That ambiguity feels true to how the natural world actually works: the
same shapes recur everywhere, low and sharp in one climate, opening toward water in
another, drought-adapted in a third.

At 8 feet 8 inches tall and 12 feet across, Sandspur asks to be walked around
rather than viewed from a single position — its broad, overlapping surfaces shifting with
the angle of approach, opening and closing, echoing the way a small, overlooked plant
can seem, from the right distance and the right light, like something worth stopping for.