Nothing really prepares you for the full-body, full-mind overhaul that comes with having a child.
One afternoon, after making my daughter cucumbers and carrots for a snack, I found myself hiding under the kitchen counter on the other side to eat a bag of chips. It was a ridiculous scene. There I was—a grown adult, hiding from a two-year-old because I didn't want her eating the very thing I was eating.
The question lingered long after the chips were gone: how do I help my daughter become the person I hope she can be?
Parenthood has a way of holding up a mirror. It asks not only what we want for our children, but whether we are willing to practice those things ourselves.
If I want my daughter to love herself, I must show her what self-love looks like. If I want her to speak her mind, I must be willing to use my own voice. If I want her to grow into a person who is confident, curious, and kind, I cannot simply tell her to become those things. I have to embody them.
Motherhood revealed a gap between what I wanted for my child and what I practiced myself.
Showing up matters. The small things matter. Every goodnight lullaby, every promise kept, every bumped knee and elbow and shin and knuckle kissed better matters.
The weight of that realization changed my relationship to art.
I began thinking about the countless ways children learn—not through instruction, but through experience. Through action. Through repetition. Through seeing what the people around them actually do.
With Our Little Hands is a two-part interactive installation exploring how children come to understand themselves through action.
Grow the Garden.
The first work invites children to draw, paint, and leave marks within a responsive digital environment on the canvas provided. Long before children understand who they are, they discover that they can affect the world around them. A cry brings a parent running. A smile is often returned. A warm handprint on cold glass leaves a trace. A scribble transforms a blank page. Through these small acts, children encounter a profound idea: I can cause change.
Each mark becomes evidence of that discovery.
Over time, these actions accumulate. Identity emerges not only through what we think, but through what we repeatedly do. Through making, caring, building, imagining, and doing, we become who we are.
At the close of each day, the collaborative canvas will be taken and preserved as a finished painting. What begins as thousands of individual marks becomes a single shared artwork—a lasting record of a community created, quite literally, with our little hands.
Tend the Garden.
The second work reimagines my wooden botanical mindscape sculptures as an immersive landscape for shared discovery. Inspired by the landscapes of the Pacific Northwest, families are invited to wander together—planting flowers across a mountain meadow, making stars twinkle, spinning the sun, sending blossoms dancing on the wind, listening to the rain, and uncovering hidden surprises woven throughout the garden.
Play is often dismissed as something children do before the real work of life begins. Yet play is how children come to understand the world. It is how they test ideas, build confidence, develop empathy, and discover what is possible.
Designed as a shared experience between children and the adults who accompany them, the landscape offers no instructions and no right answers—only invitations: to wonder, to explore, to linger, and to care. Each interaction asks visitors not simply to change the landscape, but to consider how their actions might help it flourish. In tending the garden together, children discover that the world is shaped not only by what we can do, but by how we choose to care for the things entrusted to us.
Together, these works reflect on a simple truth: our lives are shaped by countless small gestures. With our little hands, we comfort. We build. We create. We care.
And in doing so, we become who we are.