I bought an old house in Lansing with plaster failing in every room, and I went looking for anyone who still knew how to repair it. That search took me to Italy, where I trained in fresco and plaster restoration, and then to a certification back in the States. I came home knowing how plaster, pigment, and time behave together. It turned out to be most of what sculpture is.

In 2011 two men who believed in my work more than I did put me in front of a 1901 mill-supply building on Michigan Avenue. Four floors, every window boarded, bullet holes in the brick, the roof open to the rain. I couldn't afford it. I walked through it four times looking for a sign. On the fourth visit I lifted a toilet lid upstairs and found an owl painted on the underside, and I took it as the answer I had been asking my father for. I promised the first thing I made there would be an owl. He's called Mr. McQui.

I learned the plumbing from videos. A friend taught me the wiring. I restored the plaster the way I'd learned in Italy and recreated what I couldn't restore. The building became LaFille. Within a few years it held a design showroom, a studio, and eleven employees.

In 2018 eleven inches of rain came through the corner of the building. The showroom was gone, the structure was red-tagged, and I was told to get out of the place where I lived and worked. It took eighteen months to reopen. I kept carving the whole time, because I have learned this about hard years: you cannot work at something for as long as I have and have nothing come of it. Something is going to work. You just have to still be there when it does.

People ask me what resilience means. I don't think of it as toughness. It's closer to faith: the decision to believe in yourself on the days when no one else is required to. I believed I could restore a building nobody wanted. I believed I could carve in a material most sculptors avoid. Nobody had to agree with me. I did it anyway, and every piece in this building is the proof.

My medium is concrete, chosen not for ease but for honesty. It sets fast and forgives nothing. I build it up in layers and carve it back with chisels and rotary tools, color it with powdered pigment, and finish with epoxy, metal, glass, or crystal when the piece asks. A relief can take months. Bali took four years. Every piece I make involves all of me, not part of me. The stories come from my own life: motherhood, friendship, loss, a question from a grandchild, a tiger I watched move through water years before I carved him.

The work has traveled. In 2021 a monumental sculpture took second place at ArtPrize. I opened a studio in Balma, outside Toulouse, where I carved Le Tigre and presented a commissioned piece on the field to the Toulouse rugby club; the mayor named me guest of honor. The pieces hang in private homes in Michigan and Florida, in public in Lansing, and eleven of them at the regional food bank.

When someone buys a piece of my work, they are not buying decoration. They are taking home the months it took, the material fought into shape, and the story that started it. I want them to know who made it. I want it to go on a wall, around a shoulder or tied to a purse and become part of a life, something they carry, return to, and live alongside. That is why each artwork now has a House: a small set of objects made from its drawing, numbered, boxed, and sent with the story of the original. Fifty of each, so a piece of this building can go where I can't.

The building is a working studio on one floor and a gallery and event space on the others. Tours are by appointment, and the doors are open on Fridays. If you find yourself on Michigan Avenue, come in. I'll be the one with concrete on her hands.