Annie Duncan

Composition Book is a ceramic sculpture of a well-used notebook, one with a classic black-and-white cover decorated with iridescent stickers of butterflies, hearts, drops, and stars. Taking inspiration from the 1964 Roy Lichtenstein painting Composition II and a box of my childhood journals, this piece explores the guarded, all-consuming, absurd, and vulnerable nature of our innermost desires, which moment-to-moment can feel either attainable or completely out of reach. Rather than a front and back, this notebook has two covers, one labeled “Hopes and Dreams” and the other, upside down, “Unrealistic Expectations.” The pages are held ajar, but kept from opening further by a bolt chain, typically used to safeguard an apartment door. Two calla lilies— a symbol of life, purity, and new beginnings—burst out of the pages, one fresh and the other wilted. Composition Book is a monument to nurtured ambitions and the bittersweet humor in longing and failure—the ever-changing scales of our expectations vs. reality.