Diogenese is said to have kept only what he deemed the bare essentials, and narrowed his possessions down to a sole drinking cup. Until one day he watched a small child drinking from his hands in a fountain, and threw his cup away. 

Often functional objects are created to elevate and streamline actions that are possible without them. It is possible to drink with your hands and walk without shoes. Frequently, functional objects are embellished and decorated to a state far beyond their intended function. In order to explore these two aspects of functional objects, I created a cloisonne enameled, silver skipping stone. The stone is four ounces of cast fine silver, and skipped twice on a calm day on the surface of Lake Erie. 

The act of skipping a stone is one that requires an object apart from your own body. However unlike many similar acts, the loss of the stone that is skipped prevents them from entering the world of craft or design. In this piece I view skipping stones not as ephemeral objects, but as what they are, objects that come to rest where they have been skipped, and eventually wash back ashore. I contemplate whenever I skip a stone how many people have skipped it before me, and wonder if the recoverer of my piece will view it as its function or if it will never be used again.