A year after the fire I entered the CCA as a student. One of my fellow students had made a series of small figures that inspired me to incorporate them with melted glass and wood found after the fire representing how we all felt adrift and in search of a place to land after losing […]

This tall metal bird (3.5 feet) was on my wooden deck prior to the fire. Surprisingly it did not totally melt however it could no longer stand since the metal legs were twisted from the heat. A friend of mine took the bird on a long ride to a metal worker friend living in Hat […]

This was the first sculpture I made after the destruction of my home. When I first encountered the remains of my house I found on top of the pile of ash two intact ceramic goblets fused to a portion of glass. This seemed to be a miracle that these did not break since there was […]

“I do remember using all these items for the fun dinner parties I had and cherishing the sugar bowl of my grandmothers and the demitasse cup given to me by a dear friend who has since passed away.“ “When I look at the wall display, I do remember that these were some of my favorite […]

When my family and I first moved into our new home in the Oakland Hills in 2003, we began our landscaping like any other family, but then I started finding items in the dirt that seemed to belong to the previous occupants of the land. We had bought the lot from people who had bought […]

Sue Piper’s Post Fire Garden Quilt—I had made a smaller quilt like this before the fire, based on art from Lois Ehler’s children’s book Planting a Rainbow.  Several months after the fire, when I felt the urge to quilt again, I decided to remake the quilt but larger.  The flowers represent the flowers that had […]