Scepanovic first made the Muer box as a gift for guests at an intimate dinner party, part birthday, part goodbye, held before one of her best friends left the country for good. She had been casting mushroom studies in the studio, and the wood ear, the mushroom this lidded brass box takes its form from, was a natural extension of that thread. The meaning, she says, was only made in retrospect. Wood ears shrivel to a fraction of their size in dry spells, then rehydrate when the rains return, expand, and find a way back to themselves, and she has come to trust the form as a mirror of adult friendship, the kind that thins with distance and scheduling and somehow remains ever present.
 
Tina Scepanovic is a sculptor and installation artist who preserves centuries-old finishing and casting techniques in her work, some dating back to antiquity, completing by hand the dozens of surface manipulations a single piece can require.

About the Abundance & Decay Collection
 
For this collection, we invited our artists to create objects exploring the moment when the exuberant growth of summer begins its slide into the decay of autumn, the friction between the heavy, nectar-filled bloom and the curling, brown edge of the leaf, and the transformative energy found in seasons of transition.