Thirty-five years ago, I picked up a piece of wire and never put it down.

What began as a classroom exercise, guided by my public school art teacher, Ms. D, became a revelation—a simple lesson in bending wire into figures ignited a lifelong practice. That day, I returned home and stripped my house of every spiral-bound notebook I could find and unspooled the wire bindings.

That pile of harvested metal soon became my first sculpture and something much more: It became my survival! As a queer, neurodivergent, and physically disabled child, I had grown accustomed to being told that I was abnormal, tasting the sting of humiliation, and the isolation of being perceived as “too different” to be understood. But in wire, I found a material unconventional as myself—fluid, ungoverned, and resistant to easy categorization. It was validation.

In its fluid unrestrained form, I could create freely. In wire, I had the freedom to be wholly, unapologetically myself—it bent, it adapted, it yielded; it allowed me to carve out a space that was entirely my own.

- Joshua Ramirez - Noah James Saunders