Shall we dance again…

Alex knew clay. Not in the way one knows a fact, or a face, or even a lover—but in the way one knows the back of their own hands. It spoke to her. In the way it resisted and then yielded, in the quiet crackling as it dried, in the slow sigh of it settling beneath her hands, through its different stages and demands. People called it molding, shaping, creating, but Alex knew better. It was a conversation. A negotiation. A dance of collaboration, respect and trust, where sometimes the clay led, and sometimes she did. 

Two decades had passed since Alex first stumbled upon this symphony of earth and fire. She still remembered the day vividly—thankfully, she had summoned the willpower to pull herself out of a week-long sulk over her minimum-wage job at Owl’s Breakfast, a small café run by a Chinese family on Temple’s campus, where she was studying for her degree in Economics.

Her friend Benjamin, the relentless optimist, had invited her to an art exhibition downtown— a dimly lit room humming with quiet reverence, thick with the kind of heady seriousness art folks loved to drape themselves in.  Then, at the center of the room, she saw them—sculptures that defied gravity.   

The world around her faded, the murmur of voices seemed like a distant echo. She felt an ache in her chest, a pull so visceral it was as if the sculptures had reached out and taken hold of something deep inside her, something she hadn’t known was waiting to be found. They coiled like smoke, arched like bridges between worlds, their surfaces alive with the marks of hands that had loved them into being. Love at first sight had always seemed like a fantasy, something reserved for stories. But this - this was different. Before she could second-guess herself, she was marching toward the artist, a Cameroonian woman with sharp eyes and a patient smile. Words tumbled from Alex’s lips—clumsy, desperate, true. Thirty minutes later, she had secured an apprenticeship with Djakou Kassi Natalie. 

As a child, Alex loved to draw and paint, but those passions had always been treated as fleeting amusements, hobbies to be outgrown. In no world would her Nigerian immigrant parents, who had sacrificed everything for stability allow her to pursue this ‘art thing’ as they called it. It wasn’t until that moment, standing before those sculptures, that she understood Art was a calling. To ignore it, was to deny oneself.

Now, in her studio, a sunlit first-floor unit in a former cane factory in Germantown Philadelphia—she stood before the kiln, anticipation curling in her chest. Two days ago, she had loaded it with pieces meant for her first solo exhibition in Chelsea, New York. The Chelsea. The word alone was a victory, a sign that the years of calloused fingers and sleepless nights had meant something. She had measured, sculpted, and tended to them with meticulous care, each one a fragment of her enduring journey.