“Chasing Light” is about the creative process as a pursuit, featuring four artists who lead with their materials and processes. Here, ritual turns inward rather than expressed as a shared experience. In these personal rituals, the creative process is meditative, seeking clarity, release, and, at times, repair.

Jamie Sterling Pitt’s works are modest in scale, richly tactile, and quietly animated, carrying a sense of intimacy and familiarity. After a car accident and severe traumatic brain injury, he no longer perceives depth. Space is flattened to a single plane, so what reads as abstraction to us is, for him, a direct transcription. With no real recovery resources after his accident, he turned to studio work to rebuild his memory and language through ritual practice. His works on paper, with rows of small glyphs and diagrams, read like journals of accumulated impressions, and his sculpture evolve from raw and intuitive painted-wood works (2009) to more architectural and playful ceramics (2021). What may feel symbolic to us is, for Jamie, a portal. Shaped by resilience and ingenuity, these works offer a direct glimpse into his hard-won, singular way of seeing.

Margaux Crump explores myths and magic, using time-based processes to coax quiet phenomena to the surface. “For Release” is an artifact from a nine-month ritual of burning candles and accumulating wax. “Spells for Protection” bears the smoke of herbs on silk and salt crystals grown in brine. “Catching My Breath” studies breath and impermanence with a flycatcher vessel and flowers sealed under plastic. Finally, “The Parting Gift: Diagrams for Being” reimagines Margaux’s grandfather’s musings on life before he passed away as blueprints for living, linking inherited knowledge to her present practice.

Abbie Preston Edmonson’s vessels are titled “Between Starshine and Clay” after a line from Lucille Clifton’s poem “won’t you celebrate with me”. Each pairs clay with handmade paper that is stitched together with her grandmother’s thread. Left non-watertight as a metaphor for release, the forms balance clay’s endurance with paper’s fragility. Abbie embosses thoughts and mantras onto the clay. In this process, the clay is gently removed, leaving the text behind, much like how grief imprints itself on us and quietly remains even as the world around us moves forward with the everyday rhythms of life.

Richard Poe’s photographs quite literally chase light. Walking his mostly wild 3.5-acre land outside Austin, he waits for moments when color and shadow tip into spectacle: an electric-blue sky, vivid pink clouds, and wavy crescent shadows seen only during an eclipse. He recombines these photographs into collages that compress sky and earth into a single plane, with landscape turning lyrical, abstract, and alive with movement. Richard is drawn to shared rituals of looking, such as watching the sun rise or gathering on those rare occasions to witness an eclipse, all arguing for the value of holding focus until the right light hits.

Photography by Nicki Evans Photo

Videography by Tripp Films