Growing up on a family farm in the rural Midwest, I developed a deep connection to animals, land, and the women who shaped me. My work explores femininity as an inherited, practiced experience: emotional, resilient, and shaped by community. Through ceramics and hides, I explore the way in which rural femininity inhabits a textural space both coarse and soft. This effort honors craft as an undervalued labor of care–often dismissed and feminized–while rarely recognized as inherently “artistic.” My work also explores time and memory. Leather, as a material, carries the story of the being it came from, and the people who wore, worked with, and touched it. These works and materials remind me of the women and animals in my life and their seemingly contradictory nature: rough, but smooth, hardworking, yet giving, calloused, yet loving.