The Horns

The Horns - photo by Isabelle Milot

"The Horns" is a ceramic installation that deliberately inverts the symbol of the cornucopia. Where that classical form traditionally overflowed with symbols of prosperity, this one spills a fractured, multiplying mass of ceramic horns—neither fertile nor generous. Instead, it delivers a commentary on moral decay and collective dysfunction. Each horn stands as an artifact of outrage: a visual language for accumulated ethical exhaustion.

The expression “growing balls” is often used to imply assertiveness; here, that cliché is recast into “growing horns”—a transformation not into bravado, but into a sharpened, snide contempt. The installation materializes a slow-burning fury directed at societal failure: the inability—or unwillingness—of large swaths of humanity to evolve, to think critically, or to act with conscience.

What remains is not hope, but a pile of sharp, hollow forms—witnesses to what empathy becomes when its limits are reached. This is not a call to arms, but a sculptural surrender to disappointment, rendered in textured, weathered ceramic. The work invites viewers to confront their own thresholds: when care runs dry, when reason breaks, when disillusionment finally hardens into form.

This installation was part of the Fuel group show in 2019, and was exhibited along side the Fusion Fireworks 2019 travelling group at the Thames Art Gallery in Chatham, Ontario. Both ran from August 30th, to October 20th, 2019. It was also exhibited at the Canadian Clay and Glass Gallery in Waterloo, Ontario in the exhibition titled Emergence, it showed my work and that of the two other finalists of the Winifred Shantz Award for Ceramics of 2023.