The Plaque Someone Else Asked For

Every plaque before November 2025 carried my own numbers: five pregnancies, three children, my own formula written into clay or porcelain and left somewhere in the world. Then, at an exhibition, something happened that changed what this project could be.

I told a woman I met there about 5=3 — what it was, what it meant, why I'd started making these plaques. I wasn't trying to sell her on anything. And then she asked a simple question I hadn't really planned for: could I make one with her numbers instead of mine?

I said yes before I'd fully thought through what that would mean. She gave me a clear, honest description of her own feelings and her own story, and I sat down to work on it the way I always do — music on, calm, trying to stay present with what I was making.

When I finished, I felt as if I had cried for hours — even though I didn't shed a single tear. I was shocked by how emotional it felt. I guess I was so deeply inside the process, so connected to her story, that my body reacted for me.

I hadn't expected the making of it to affect me quite that much. It's one thing to sit with your own numbers, your own grief, your own formula. It's another thing entirely to hold someone else's loss carefully enough, and closely enough, to shape it correctly in clay.

This one has stayed with me differently than most, maybe because it changed what I thought the project was for. Up until then, every plaque had either been mine, or carried somewhere by a friend on my behalf — but always my numbers, my formula. Once someone else's story could live in the same clay, the whole shape of the project shifted a little, right around the stretch of time that later became one of the busiest years this project has had. I don't think that's a coincidence.

I'm so grateful she trusted me with something that personal, and I'm absolutely ready to make more pieces like this — for anyone whose numbers aren't the same as mine, but who needs them written down somewhere real all the same.