Life-size heads made of unfired clay with strong bone structure, faces turned upward, placed along hiking trails in the high desert outside Santa Fe.

Each one held something buried inside: stones, bone, sharks’ teeth, sea urchin quills. When the rains came, they cried. Water pooled in the eye sockets and ran around the cheekbones. Over days or weeks, each head dissolved into a pillow of clay, releasing what it carried.

I did not always witness their disappearance. I would find the aftermath: white clay where the native soil was amber. Red clay where the native soil was pale. No photographs of the original heads exist. The work was not made to be documented. It was made to be encountered and to dissolve. What you see here is a rendering of the concept. The originals are in the ground.