Collecting various skeletal parts of dead animals washed up on my beach at Linda Mar—including hip socket, claws, leg bones, vertebrae, and shells--I imagined a falling bird-person figure, plummeting from a great height, its wings shedding, useless, as they fell toward earth—Icarus-like. Inspired by Betye Saar’s wonderful African-sourced tapestry hangings, I sought to make a personal totem of what it means to fall—how terrifying the experience is—to fall out of your reality of yourself and into the next one. Specifically occasioned by the parts you hate—wondering if you’ll be able to fall more fully into the parts you’d like to love. The gender is non-binary—the pelvis has both mons pubis and phallus. Sourcing Finnegan’s Wake, Laurie Anderson’s Falling, and the Haudenosaunee myth of Skywoman, the fall is a comic act of human growth, and even rebirth. The extended wood roots do provide an earthly grounding with its soft feathery cushioning -- and the figure does miraculously manage to hold onto one single white gossamer plume as it plummets 32 feet/sec/sec.