I made this sculpture in 2025, while thinking about how protect my children’s ability to imagine a more humane future in our global age of unrelenting cruelty and destruction.

I drew on “the breaking of vessels,” an ancient story about a catastrophe that took place during creation in which “divine light” was packed into vessels that then shattered. Our responsibility, as the story goes, is to recover the shards as an act of world repair. I also thought about a verse often quoted in my family — “the whole entire world is a very narrow bridge / and the main thing is not to fear.”

The sculpture itself was made of kid stuff: air-dry clay, a broken cereal bowl, string, wire, playground woodchips, hot glue. The piece now lives in the form of this photo essay.