The Night Blooming Cereus is a flower that thrives in a steam environment and has a very particularly distinguishing attribute: it blooms but one night per year. The flower is quite large and fragrant but otherwise the plant’s appearance is quite tall, leafy and fairly unattractive especially when potted indoors. There are those who stage all-night viewing parties when it is expected to bloom but the pain of dealing with its encumbrance seems hardly worth the wait. Once the bloom occurs, the party is over the very next day. Unless you’re me. Indeed, what I found most interesting about this plant was the state of the now spent bloom on the morning after. It is quite a unique object - very sensual and textural both in its physical state as well as that of its colors. It almost appeared as if it were an alien from another world lost on this planet of ours and suffering from a lack of the elements that would otherwise sustain it. It is these types of “things” that often catch my eye, often for reasons at that moment that I don’t particularly understand. Years later, I will see some old discarded item that no one else wanted in a shaft of light sitting on my display shelf and I will go “aha!” And an image that apparently had been lurking in my mind’s eye finally finds its way out. And so it is that I collect a lot of objects - usually discarded objects; things that time has passed by. An old toy, an antique egg slicer, a sea shell, or vintage camera. Eroded by time and human touch, these pieces have attained a patina of softened edges and wabi-sabi that almost leaps out at me. They become objects of my eye’s desire.