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My approach to a project initiates from a mentality concerning necessity and romanticism. This outlook results in thoroughly essential and developed stories, created from a speculative process that ensures a peculiar collection of abstract elements. Valuing a strict concentration to what is essential, I focus on finding the true material essence that these stories pose.

Whether a person you lived with has come and gone or you simply live alone, physical voids are felt in place of the people missing inside our homes. They manifest themselves as extra space in an unfilled bed, as holding a door open behind you for someone who isn’t there, or, as I’ve chosen, the quietness of sitting alone at a dining table.

To make this experience less vacant, I wanted to introduce a formal tension within the table that would fill an otherwise empty place setting while understating an emotional absence. By treating the surface as if it were being lifted from underneath, the unoccupied place becomes unusable while a vulnerable point has been created at the height of its rise. The broad dimensions of the table and oblong placement of the rise leave the use and manners within this area open to interpretation. A gradual swell reaches partly into the neighboring areas to mimic the sense and effect of discourse during a seated gathering at an otherwise muted landscape.

Consequent to society’s increasing commodity demand, communities’ resources are falling ever further from their front doors. We are witnessing the separation of materials that once naturally belonged to- gether as quick routine eclipses our capacity for singular experience. This project is meant to re-ennoble a small act of personal consumption through the honoring of its various elements. I set out to realize a new a ritual around the way we eat with salt, one that will emphasize both its fragility and substance, its finite yet profound influence on our sense of taste and ritual.

Cut from granite, the ritual’s three parts -- a plate, shell, and vessel -- have each been treated with different finishes to exploit the material’s diversity as well as make tactile the shapes’ character. Granite’s heaviness acts as an intended foil to the pouring and protecting of the ritual’s fragile mountains of salt rendering them remarkably delicate. Capturing salt from the base of these mounds by a pressing of the finger, one sets off subtle avalanches, both refreshing the salt and communicating measure. Between the rough, satin and polished objects, a clear dialogue of purpose emerges: a redeeming narrative on the loss of delicacy in a time of excess.