Baby Elephants Suck Their Trunks For Comfort

A small box, 7 by 7 by 4 inches, holds clear and transparent colors in a strict frame. Each face is fully glazed, so every sightline passes through two panes at once. Colors combine in the captured air: yellow through red reads as orange, then a step later the orange disappears and the same surface is now a deep green. The glass on all six sides was chosen and placed so that each move re-writes the mixture you see.

I want the first read to feel simple and contained, then to turn. As you walk it, the piece teaches a quiet lesson: the image is not in any single pane, it lives in the relationship between panes. Surfaces are kept smooth to carry light, and the twelve steel edges keep a steady, regular frame; in that restraint the color work becomes the subject.

Much of my practice resists a fixed view; here that instability is small and intimate. I often understand myself through adjacency more than essence, and this piece accepts that condition. You cannot isolate a single color and know it; you learn it by what it sits beside. The title points to a private act of self-soothing, and the object offers a quiet enclosure where looking can be a way to stay with that truth.