Threshold Tidescape

Salt stains linger under my nails. There’s a hush to the materials when you first touch them—powdered pigments, damp clay, the cold slip of glass—but behind that quiet is a gathering pressure, the memory of basins filling and draining, the breath that coastal cities hold at the edge of water. I built these tiles with the patience of someone tracing old infrastructure: each arch recalled from the shadow of a canal wall, each grid mapped from satellite images of the Atacama salt basins where my mother once worked. It is not nostalgia that compels me, but the need to name what brackets our days: threshold, turbulence, the shimmer of something about to change state. The silver is there for the mineral wounds, the blue for the cooling. I do not want people to feel safe exactly—I want them to feel the precision of a harbor at slack tide, caught in the suspense between overflow and retreat.