I have always collected things. Bones, buttons, feathers, fragments. Magazines from decades I never lived in, shells from beaches I visited once, stones from mountains that existed before me. People call this hoarding, or sentimentality, or the strange habit of a person who cannot let go. But I have learned, across forty-four years and a thousand moves and a life that has required me to rebuild myself more times than I can count, that the things that we keep are not just things. They are evidence. Evidence of where we have been. Evidence of who has loved us. Evidence that we were here, paying attention, when something small and beautiful and temporary crossed our path.
“The Collection” is the most honest thing I have ever made.
It began as a shelf. It became a world.
Walk up to it slowly. Start on the left and move right the way you would read a book, the way you would learn a person. Here is my face, cased in ceramic, eyes closed, resting on a book called “When Everything Goes Wrong.” This is not despair. This is rest. This is the moment after the crying stops, when you are still lying on the floor, but your breathing has steadied and you understand, quietly, that you will get up again. I made this mask from a mold of my own face. I fired it in a raku glaze that shines like oil on water, like something alive. Beside it three oracle cards lean in a jar with a cicada and a spider. The cards speak of the Gloominous Doom, of the self-pity that slides into self-destruction, and the strange gift of sitting in that darkness long enough to know its shape. You cannot see all the cards from where you stand. That is the point. Somethings are only for the people who ask.
Just in front of these cards and my sleeping face, a buck skull. We call him Seven Thirty, because that is when my dad shot him, years ago, in a hunt I did not attend. When he learned I was collecting bones for my art he cleaned this skull with a pressure washer wearing a hazmat suit, which is the most “my father” thing I can imagine. He brought me that skull and its companion, Eight O’Clock. I made him promise to never clean another bone that way again. Just put them on an anthill, I said. Let nature do its work. He laughed and gave me the skulls anyway. I have adorned Seven Thirty and Eight O’Clock with dried roses from partner Orrin, who gives me flowers constantly and watches me hang them upside down to dry, never complaining about the dead things accumulating in our home. The roses are dead. The buck is dead. The love that placed them together is not.
Beside Seven Thirty, a scrap of paper. I just wanted to say I love you, it says, in Orrin’s handwriting. He left it in my pencil box for my first semester when I was terrified and I had no idea what I was doing. I still don’t know what I am doing. I keep the paper anyway.
A likeness of a painted bunting represents every sighting I have had of this wildly technicolor bird since moving to Georgia. I never looked for them. They simply appeared again and again, like the universe reminding me that beauty does not require seeking. A wooden phoenix candle holder from Germany, bought from a craftsman who threw it in for free, now dripping with wax I hope will accumulate for decades. A brass bee candle snuffer, because my husband has been working with the motif of bees, and because I love the idea of our muses sitting together on a shelf like old friends. A small orange butterfly I found dying in Georgia, for which I left sponges soaked in water and honey, not knowing if butterflies even eat that way, not knowing anything except that something was dying and I wanted it to feel accompanied. It died anyway. I put it in a tiny frame and placed it here.
A lava glass bowl full of ocean treasures. Shells from Jekyll Island, where I beachcomb my favorite shore in Georgia. A horseshoe crab shed and a starfish my father gave me for Christmas one year, promising they were ethically sourced. I prefer to collect my own, to know the story, to be certain. But I kept his gifts anyway because he thought of me when he saw them, and that is its own kind of ethic.
A one-legged pigeon doll. Her name is Cher Ami. In 1918, a real pigeon by that name saved a battalion of American Soldiers by delivering a message despite being shot through the breast, losing a leg, and blinded in one eye. I learned about her when I was in the Army, when I was learning what it meant to be a soldier, to carry messages, and to keep going when you are broken. She sits here now, perched on the lava bowl, one leg gone, watching over everything. She is a war hero. She is a tiny doll made of felt. She is both things at once.
We now come to Eight O’Clock, the doe, who sits flush to the surface with roses and jaw bones framing her face like a veil. Behind her, peacock feathers from my brother’s promotion to Major, when I pinned him in the Quadrangle in Fort Sam Houston and felt, for a moment, like the proudest sister in the world. In the vase along with the peacock feather and other collected feathers, the jaw bones of Seven Thirty. Two wishbones from Thanksgiving dinners with my stepchildren, saved because I save everything, because I knew that they would one day be grown and these tiny bones would be all I have of the years they sat at my table.
A hanging globe, half-moon shaped, containing a nest of Spanish moss and a Luna moth, broken, her green wings tattered, long tails bent. Beneath her in a piece of dried ground moss are tattered brightly tiny colored feathers of songbirds I have collected on hikes over the years. The moth is broken. The feathers are remnants of a life on the wing. I placed them together because this is what tenderness looks like when there is nothing left to save. We do not always get to preserve the things we love in their perfection. Sometimes we only get to hold what remains and call it enough.
A whimsical doll, feminine and flowy, who belonged to my grandmother on my father’s side. She represents the softness I sometimes try to access, the femininity I admire from a distance, the part of me that feels completely out of place next to my feral, rough-and tumble self. Beside her, a black cat, her familiar, who knows she is really just a beast in disguise. And in front of them, a ceramic circle of dogs and cats holding hands around a candle bonfire, which I found at a thrift store colored in bright 90’s pastels, which I spray painted solid black so it would stop pretending to be something its not. It looks a little sinister now. It looks more like me.
A leather book with an antler handle, a dove wing tucked inside, and a letter from my dad. The letter recounts a story I had forgotten; me at two years old, fascinated by a fish in an aquarium, repeating its name. Plecostomus, Plecostomus, Plecostomus, over and over while staring into the glass. He remembers this. He remembers thinking what a big word for such a little girl. He remembers every accomplishment since. The greatest warrior in his life, he calls me. The letter is dated Father’s Day of 2025. His best friend, brother, and my God Father (Uncle Bill) died four months after he penned it. The pipe is here because where else would it go? The letter is here because I need to remind myself that despite the political chasm between us, he saw me and was proud.
In front of all of this, the alligator skull. This alligator was part of a hunt my dad, Orrin, and I won a lottery tag for at Fort Stewart. We learned everything we knew about alligator hunting from watching Swamp People. Somehow, we succeeded. This is that alligator skull, now adorned with its own dried florals, its own reverence. It sits on this shelf because that hunt was one of the last times the three of us did something that focused together, something difficult and absurd and triumphant, before the world got complicated.
Another vase of feathers, porcupine quills from my mother-in-law who visited a zoo and thought of me. Turkey feathers collected from Clark Fork where I am soon to spend my ever after. A woodpecker representing a yellow-bellied sap sucker- a bird I never knew existed until I moved to the South where everything is new and strange and waiting to be noticed. A deer skull in a terrarium, shabby and imperfect, proof that I have been making art like this for years, long before I had words for what I was doing.
At the far end a piece of teal driftwood I hauled out of the ocean in Hawaii over twenty years ago. My first duty station, my first time living thousands of miles from everyone I loved. I have carried this wood with me through every move since, through aquariums and apartments and houses and military bases, through twenty-three years of becoming myself. It now serves as a display for small treasures; crystals and stones, a jade rooster from China (my own zodiac), a tourmaline turtle, moonstones, and a glass bubble containing a preserved anole lizard; one of the dead lizards that inspired this whole show. A polish pottery vase with polish pottery butterflies. A bouquet of palm frond roses from my COVID elopement in Savannah when Orrin and I said our vows in front of no one and meant every word. In front of the roses sit two leather masks representing my partnership with Orrin, guardians of the cosmology.
A red fan with a black cat looking out a rainy window. I have three cats. I have always had three cats. They are my familiars, my constant companions, the creatures who have witnessed every breakdown and breakthrough of my adult life. They are here too, in spirit, watching from the shelf.
Tiny jars everywhere. One with an edelweiss I picked in the alps. One with two bumble bees and a cicada shell. One with rose quartz and flower petals from a crystal grid I made, dismantled, and kept anyway. More cicada shells. Cicada wings. Molted skins of creatures who outgrew themselves and moved on.
This is not an altar. This is a portrait. This is not worship. This is witness.
Everything on this shelf has a story. Everything on this shelf has been saved. The buck skull from my dad and the alligator skull from our hunt and the driftwood from Hawaii and the moth from my back yard and the feathers from my walks and the notes from my partner and the letter from my dad and the feathers from my brothers promotion and the wishbones from my stepchildren’s thanksgivings and the cards that speak of Gloominous Doom and unconditional giving and creative chaos and a pigeon who saved a battalion and my own face, eyes closed, resting on a book about everything going wrong.
I am on this shelf. All of me. The Soldier and the Artist. The daughter and the partner, the collector and the collected. The woman who carries driftwood across oceans and the child who dug in the mud and found treasures and arranged them into meaning.
I am still that child. I am still digging. I am still arranging.
This is what I have found so far.
-Dayna Thompson, 22 February 2026