My name is

Jocelyn and I make botanical reliefs in fine plaster, cast directly from living plants. A flower or leaf is pressed into clay while it is still fresh, and plaster is poured into the impression it leaves. When the clay is lifted away, what remains is that one plant at a single moment: the veins of a leaf, the stamens, the fine hairs along a stem. I don't take molds or make editions. Each piece happens once, the way the plant did.

My work begins in gardens. I photograph them and cast from them, and together the photographs and the plaster become a record of one place in one season, the kind of detail a person walking past might never stop long enough to see.

I'm drawn to objects that carry time, pieces that feel less like decoration than like companions, that settle a room and the person in it. I think of what I make as heirlooms, things meant to be kept and passed on.

Touch has become part of the work. A cast holds detail the living flower is too fragile to offer, and I've begun making pieces that ask to be held, not only looked at. Most art is kept at a distance. I'd like some of mine to close it, for anyone who comes to it, including people who know the world first through their hands.