My Blue Bunny
Sculpture
Ernest G. Welch School of Art & Design Gallery, Atlanta, Georgia, United States

My Blue Bunny is a kiln-formed glass recreation of the artist’s first possession, a bunny blanket they carried from birth through early childhood. The original object was lost, so the piece is rebuilt from memory, shaped as much by what is remembered as by what can’t be fully recovered. It reflects on early attachment and the quiet ways identity begins to form.

Cast in glass, the bunny holds both fragility and emotional weight. What was once soft and comforting becomes delicate and fixed, turning a childhood object into something closer to a relic. Its worn, torn form echoes the way memory fades and shifts over time, holding presence and absence at once.

Within Three Tries: The Beginning, the work sits in conversation with a larger structure where each element connects to both the Stations of the Cross and Freud’s psychosexual stages. My Blue Bunny aligns with the oral stage, the earliest phase of development, when comfort and security are experienced through the body, especially through touch and the mouth. It’s a time when the self depends entirely on something outside of it.

Here, the bunny becomes the artist’s first site of attachment, a source of comfort, dependency, and care. It’s the object through which need is soothed, long before those needs can be named or understood.

The sculpture holds onto that moment, when emotional reliance comes before language and self-awareness. As the artist reflects, “the bunny was my god,” placing the object within a space of devotion, need, and the earliest shaping of the psyche.

Photography by Ross Landenberger