This first entry begins with my time as a Creative Fellow at The Wolfsonian–FIU. Spending two weeks immersed in the museum’s archives was both an honor and a turning point: an opportunity to slow down, study closely, and engage with objects that hold layered histories of design, architecture, and material culture. Being invited into that space, and given the time to look, especially at this moment in my practice, felt deeply meaningful. Not only as a “recovering academic,” but as an artist invested in building a personal archive of forms and ideas that continue to inform the work over time.
All images courtesy The Wolfsonian–Florida International University, Miami Beach, Florida.
Le Castel Béranger by Hector Guimard
I kept returning to these studies from Le Castel Béranger by Hector Guimard.
The book comes from the library’s rare collection, generously shared by their librarian, Frank Luca. Looking closely at Hector Guimard’s studies, I became interested in how ornament begins to behave like a system, shifting between drawing, material, and built form.
Above: Further studies from the volume show the repetition and variation of these forms across different architectural applications.
Below: Here, the language settles into surface—patterns unfolding across tile and mosaic, where ornament becomes inseparable from the architecture that holds it.
This final plate isolates the fragments themselves—small ornamental components that read almost like a catalog of parts, hinting at the modular logic behind the larger system.
La Ferronnerie Moderne
These plates come from La Ferronnerie Moderne, a publication dedicated to early 20th-century French decorative ironwork. While distinct from Guimard’s work, they reflect a parallel language, where natural motifs are stylized into structured, repeatable systems. I’m drawn to how these compositions balance geometry and ornament, particularly in ways that feel surprisingly close to Miami’s own architectural vocabulary.
These panels unfold as layered compositions of ornament. What draws me in is how the surfaces seem to grow, built from fragments, yet reading as continuous fields.
These works, including screens by Edgar Brandt, operate as thresholds—structures that divide and connect at once. I’m interested in how they frame space without fully enclosing it, allowing light, air, and landscape to pass through. This kind of ornamental screening feels largely absent from contemporary public space, yet it closely aligns with my interest in fencing, permeability, and bringing the outside into the architecture of everyday environments.
In the archive, I encountered pochoir for the first time: a method of building color through hand-cut stencils and layered application. What drew me in was the rhythm of the process, repetition, precision, and the gradual construction of surface through touch. I found clear parallels to my own mold-making and production processes, where form and surface are developed through layering, iteration, and material translation.
Pochoir
From a book outlining pochoir techniques, these diagrams demonstrate how stencils are constructed, layered, and reassembled to control the application of pigment. I was particularly interested in how the process is documented so precisely, almost as a set of instructions or protocols. It made me think about developing a similar system within my own practice: a way of recording processes for repeatability, variation, and quality control.
These pochoir prints, including botanical studies by Mathurin Méheut, were produced as limited-edition works for collectors at a time when printmaking and decorative arts overlapped with luxury publishing. The process was hand-applying color through layered stencils, making each image both precise and labor-intensive, positioning these books as crafted objects as much as visual references.
As printing technologies advanced, more efficient methods replaced pochoir, and the technique gradually fell out of use, leaving behind a record of a moment when reproduction was still deeply tied to the hand.
In these compositions from Fantasies, Henri Raskin draws on marine plant life, coral-like structures, sea grasses, and underwater forms, reworking them into highly stylized, graphic compositions.
The segmentation of color gives the impression of movement, almost like currents passing through the image.
I was captivated by Insectes, by E. A. Séguy, which transforms insect forms into vivid, patterned compositions using pochoir. I’m drawn to the way these images sit between scientific study and ornament, where classification and decoration begin to overlap.
Color and pattern are embedded directly into the structure of each insect. I’m interested in how these surfaces read almost like constructed systems—similar to tile or glaze work—built from small, repeating units.
ON THE ART OF STENCILS
Translated from the French:
Those who delve into such sources find themselves moved, as I was, their souls distilled.
Just as happened to me, they see their Psyche revealed, their aspiration beyond encompassed, as if appeased in the image.
Captivated by the great allure of these sheets, I felt that the Spirit-Being that dwells within us, the veiled Narcissus that constructs the order of our work, leaning here at the sources of values among these industrious branches, was utterly fascinated, utterly enthralled by these copies, these synthetic mirrors where all the arachnid branches vibrate in flat reflections.
Each of the identical copies, bearing the same echoing accent, multiplies, propagates from source to source, from painted wave to painted wave, from near to far.
—Traité d'enluminure d'art au pochoir (1925)
SUR L'ART DES POCHOIRS
Ceux qui lisent au fond de telles sources y sur- prennent émus, ainsi que je le fis, leur âme résumée.
Tout ainsi qu'il m'advint ils voient leur Psyché découverte, leur au-delà d'aspiration comme totalisé, dans l'image comme apaisée.
Pris au grand attrait de ces feuilles, j'ai cru sentir que l'Étre-esprit qui vit en nous, le Narcisse voilé qui construit l'ordre de notre œuvre, penché ici aux sources des valeurs parmi ces ramées ouvrières, était tout fasciné, était tout pris en ces copies, en ces miroirs synthèses où vibrent en reflets étales tous les rameaux Arachnéens.
Chacune des copies égales, ayant le même accent d'Écho, se multiplie, se propage de source ensource, de l'onde peinte à l'onde peinte, du plan proche au plan éloigné.
—Traité d'enluminure d'art au pochoir (1925)
Architecture and Design
Unrolling these original architectural drawings from the Nautilus Hotel archive felt like a rare privilege. The hand-drawn plans carry visible traces of their making, coffee stains, cigarette burns, smudges, marking the labor embedded in the work.
Beyond the precision of the drawings, it’s the presence of the hand that stays with me, a reminder that these systems and structures were once built through touch, time, and repetition.
This volume felt like a crown jewel of the collection. In Instances of Accessory Art, Lewis F. Day composes ornament into complete systems, patterns that expand outward, balancing intricacy with structure across the surface.
The text in Instances of Accessory Art reflects on the relationship between scientific precision and artistic expression, framing ornament as something that exists between system and intuition. This balance continues to inform how I think about process in my own work.
This comes from a design catalogue of electroliers, lamps, and gas standards; objects intended for public space, but rendered with an almost excessive level of detail. I’m drawn to how even these infrastructural elements are treated as sites for ornament, where function becomes a framework for elaboration.
The designs sit somewhere between infrastructure and decoration. The function is clear, but it’s almost secondary to the layering of form. Creatures, vegetal motifs, and structural elements all folded into a single object.
The first book I encountered in the archive set a quiet foundation for the rest of the experience. In Lewis F. Day’s writing, ornament is treated as a discipline, something governed by logic, structure, and observation.
Nature, filtered through structure, reduced, repeated, and reassembled into a language that can travel across surfaces and materials.
This feels like a study in variation—how a single natural form is abstracted and reinterpreted across different periods and applications. The structure remains, even as the surface shifts.
What stayed with me most was the consistency of thought across these materials. The way systems, repetition, and ornament move fluidly between disciplines. Whether in print, architecture, or object design, there’s a shared logic of building through layers, of translating observation into structure. It’s a way of working that feels deeply aligned with my own process: one that moves between collecting, testing, and refining. This experience didn’t necessarily give me answers, but it sharpened the questions I’m asking, and clarified the direction I’m continuing to follow in the work.