unsung creatures of the forest, in plain sight



Five mosaic sculptures for trails and wild spaces in the Pacific Northwest. Each one portraying a creature most people walk past without seeing — rendered in luminous glass and gold at exactly human scale.

What if the creatures most people overlook — the ones doing essential, unglamorous, life-sustaining work in the dark and the damp and the in-between places — what if they were impossible to miss?

Each sculpture stands 5′5″ — the height of the average woman. Not a monument to look up at. Not a curiosity to look down at. A peer. An equal. By day: vivid, luminous, alive. By night: catching only moonlight and starlight — a gold shard here, an obsidian eye there. Present but requiring you to look. Just like the real thing.

You cannot argue someone out of fear. You cannot lecture them into comfort. But you can make them fall in love with something before they know its name.

“This is not decoration. This is revelation.”

The Five

  1. Lady Understory, a Virginia Opossum

  2. Georgia, a Turkey Tail Fungus

  3. Lucky, an American Pika

  4. Gloria, the Banana Slug

  5. Caught Between Seasons, the White-tailed Ptarmigan

Status

Series One in Active Development for the Pacific Northwest

Lady Understory, the first piece, is in design and material development.

About

I have been paying attention to the forest for a long time. Not studying it, just paying attention to it. The way you do when something gives you back more than you bring to it.

A few years ago I wept, and I mean I really wept, when a car I was in may have struck an opossum on a road at night. I didn’t know anything about opossums then. I hadn’t read about the ticks they eat by the thousands, or the ancient lineage stretching back 70 million years, or the protein in their blood being studied as a universal antivenom that could one day save human lives. I just saw a small creature going about its night and then suddenly, maybe, gone.

That gap between how much it mattered to me and how little it would matter to most people passing the same spot is what Common Wonders is about.

You cannot argue someone out of fear. You cannot lecture them into comfort. But you can make them fall in love with something before they know its name.

I chose mosaic the way most good things choose you: joyfully and without warning. It started with outdoor statues. A Flamingo. Lots of Bunnies. Frogs. The kind of bedazzling that starts as play and becomes something you can’t stop. I adorned every garden creature I could find in glass flowers as though they were living topiaries. and if you walked past quickly they might look like just that. Flowers in a garden. Nothing unusual.

But some people slowed down. And then stopped. And then there was a double take, the small oh, the moment of discovery landing on their face before they could think about it. That moment is what I am chasing. Not the smile exactly — although I love seeing the smile that follows — but the instant just before it, when something catches the eye and interrupts whatever was filling the mind and replaces it, briefly and completely, with wonder.

In the Pacific Northwest we live inside grey skies and deep shadow for most of the year. Color here is not decoration. It is relief. Mosaic glass holds light differently than anything else I know: it catches it, bends it, gives it back changed. A luminous creature on a trail in a dark forest is not just beautiful. It is a small interruption in the ordinary. An oh you didn’t see coming.

Every time someone looked twice at one of my garden creatures I wanted to make another. I have only gotten grander in my ambitions since. That is still exactly what I am doing, with a forest as my garden.

I am a self-taught aspiring mosaicist, a committed hiker, and a Leave No Trace steward who has been paying close attention to the forest for a long time. I am slowly and joyfully learning how to make that attention visible in glass and gold. I am engaging with and learning from master mosaicists, fabricators, and many other collaborators, while continuing to grow my own skills in mosaic through training and consultation. I am building this carefully and for the long term.

commonwonders.art is in active development. Lady Understory is coming first.

The forest is for everyone who enters it with care. So are the creatures in it. So is this work.

— Stephanie Seracka

Common Wonders