Earth & Ether brings together four artists working across sculpture, video, drawing, and poetry. The exhibition moves between what is earthbound and certain and what is atmospheric and open. Throughout, objects and images stir associations without settling into a single meaning, opening space for possibility and a quieter kind of hope, the theme of this year’s Jones Artist Awards program.

Katrina Moorhead

In Dark Hearth, an oak shelf traces a shifting line across the wall, its shape attuned to the objects it holds and its relationship to our body. Moorhead treats the hearth as a gathering place where unrelated objects share space: Irish peat sod, a frilled murex shell, and brushes fitted with bells. Two works introduce resilience and hope. Dark Botanical places the hardy coastal sea pink, regarded as a survivor plant, in a dark field relieved by color and glinting black salt. In Blush, rose glass lends color to a watercolor of an albiflora lily. Altogether, they hold darkness and possibility in tension.

Carole F. Smith

Carole F. Smith’s ceramic sculptures draw on childhood memories of visiting standing stones with her parents in Scotland. During a 2023 residency in Greece, she encountered a sacred stone at a Minoan archaeological site. Its shape echoed work already underway in her studio and affirmed the standing stone as an archetype that carries emotional weight across time. Her glazes suggest weathering, sediment, and mineral buildup, while her pastel pinks and yellows feel distinctly contemporary.

 Virginia L. Montgomery

Virginia L. Montgomery raises the Texas butterflies and moths that appear in her videos. She films their transformation in a delicate, dreamlike register that carries through to the sound: layered field recordings, bells ringing, and water dripping. Her experience with AuDHD and synesthesia shapes her attention to macro details and uncanny connections. In her work, a moth’s wings carry the same visual weight as the moon, drawing nature’s smallest moments into relation with the cosmos.

 Ahra Cho

Ahra Cho moved from Seoul to the United States at fourteen and found freedom from the limits of her second language in poetry. Her drawings respond to the poems by Emily Dickinson, translating their emotional texture into clouds of color and gestural lines. For this exhibition, she also created a ceramic work paired with a poem for her daughter, A Dream of Becoming a Name, which gives form to her belief that “poetic expression, not clarity, opens a way to quiet hope.”

Curated by Weingarten Art Group, Earth & Ether is the third exhibition of the 2026 Jones Artist Awards Program, created by Houston Endowment in 2023 to recognize local artists and reflect the many stories and perspectives of Greater Houston’s residents.

Photography by Rony Canales

Videography by Tripp Films