Occasionally I get questions about the name I chose for my business, which is fair: for a lot of folks, it brings broken limbs in slings to mind. I only became aware of limb casts after I got into rockhounding, and before I’d ever seen one I fell in love with the concept.

Warning: I’m gonna wax poetic about rocks for a second.

The creation of a limb cast is just like any other mineral building up in the gas pockets of volcanic stone, but, to me, more evocative than an agate nodule. The idea that an organic body could erode away and be replaced by vibrantly colored minerals while retaining its texture is incredible. The romantic part of my brain wants to imagine whole mineral trees somewhere underground.

Casting has always been a fascination of mine. In particular, the part in a burnout where what you want to reproduce is just a negative space in the investment, existing as an absence. All the casting I’ve done has been quick: hours in the kiln, and then a flurry of action to melt the metal and inject it. What a beautiful thing that it can also happen slowly, little by little, as groundwater rises and falls, building something new in the image of what was there before.

Also: they’re just cool. That’s what it comes down to, really: they’re fascinating and beautiful, transmuting from one state of being into another. They’re beautiful as their original limbs, their absences, and in their mineralized forms.

I’m very attached to narratives about transformation, and I attribute that in part to being non-binary. I’m always in a shifting state of being: how I want to present, what makes me feel good vs awful; so many little things that come and go like the groundwater.

All this to say: limb casts- not just for broken arms.