Dùthchas: Appalachia Held in Glass
There are some places we carry with us.
For me, Appalachia is one of them.
It is the smell of the woods after rain. Red clay under my shoes. Moss growing over something that has been there longer than I have. Creek stones worn smooth by water. Pine needles, bark, soil, and all the little things I have spent a lifetime picking up, noticing, and bringing home.
I have never needed those things to be extraordinary before they mattered to me.
Maybe that is exactly why they do.
Dùthchas grew from that connection.
Dùthchas is a Scottish Gaelic word that carries a meaning much larger than a simple translation. It speaks to the connection between people, land, ancestry, belonging, and the place from which we come.
When I discovered the word, I knew immediately why it had found me.
My Scottish ancestry is something I have always felt deeply connected to. I’ve felt a pull toward Scotland for as long as I can remember, and bringing that part of my ancestry into my work has been incredibly meaningful to me.
But what fascinates me even more is where that story meets Appalachia.
The deeper I’ve gone into my own roots, the more I’ve found myself thinking about the connections between these two places. Scotland and Appalachia may sit on opposite sides of the Atlantic today, but their stories are connected by ancestry, migration, culture, and even the ancient history of the land itself.
There is something about that which feels very much like Dùthchas to me.
We carry place with us.
That became the heart of these little glass vessels.
Each Dùthchas is created with materials gathered from the Appalachian landscape around me. Creek stones and sand. Red clay and dark earth. Moss, bark, lichen, pine needles, and other small pieces of the land that catch my attention.
And then there is the salt.
West Virginia salt comes from an ancient sea that existed hundreds of millions of years ago. I love knowing that something held beneath this land for an almost unimaginable amount of time can now become part of a piece about place, ancestry, memory, and connection.
That story deserves one of its own, and someday I’ll tell it.
When I create a Dùthchas, I’m not trying to make a miniature version of Appalachia.
I’m gathering pieces of a place and allowing them to remain what they are.
I don’t need the moss to become something else. The stone doesn’t need to be polished. The clay doesn’t need to be refined until there is no evidence left of where it came from.
That evidence is the point.
There is something deeply grounding to me about holding a stone that came from the creek behind my home or seeing the layers of red clay and dark soil through the glass.
These are ordinary things.
But ordinary doesn’t mean meaningless.
The older I get, the more I think some of the strongest connections we have to a place are made from exactly these things. The smell of the earth. The sound of water. The kind of stone beneath your feet. The trees you recognize without needing to know their names.
Home becomes part of us in ways we don’t always notice until we leave it.
Maybe that is why the meaning of Dùthchas affected me so much.
It gave a name to something I already understood.
My work has always been about connection. Connection to people and animals, to things that came before us, to the land beneath our feet, and to the parts of ourselves we sometimes know without being able to explain how we know them.
Dùthchas gives me a way to make some of that connection tangible.
A little Appalachian earth.
A stone shaped by the creek.
Something gathered from the forest floor.
A trace of an ancient sea.
All held together in glass.
My Scottish ancestry gave me the word.
Appalachia gave me what to put inside it.
And somewhere between the two, I found a way to hold a little piece of home.
I invite you to experience Dùthchas.
