Mute Little Goose

ESSAY, CHARCOAL SKETCH & CLAY
JANUARY 3, 2026

“This life, which is such a fine thing, is not the life we are acquainted with, but that of which we know nothing; it is not the past life, but the future. With the New Year, Fate will commence treating you, and me, and everyone well, and the happy life will begin. Am I not right?”

Giacomo Leopard

Every New Year arrives with the same question, cloaked in a new sparkle: what are you going to become now? Resolutions line up like polite demands. Improve this. Fix that. They promise transformation, clarity, progress — but they are rarely neutral wishes. They assume that life, like an object, should be optimized; that the time ahead of us must already know what it is for. A resolution is never just a desire; it is a promise of function.
Leopardi, writing with the kind of melancholy that never fully trusted happy endings, suggested something else — something more seductive: suspension. The good life, he proposed, isn’t the one we already know, or the one we’ve already lived, but the one that remains just out of reach — unknown, unfinished, and therefore still possible. So what if the most radical New Year’s wish is not to resolve anything at all? What if it is to remain unfinished?

In 2020, many of my plans fell through because of the pandemic, and I returned to being a student. I went to study illustration at Falmouth University. Instead of feeling delayed, I felt protected. I found myself in a space where not knowing wasn’t a problem to solve, but the point. During that time, I worked on a project called Mute Little Goose.

It began with artefacts and with making something that didn’t immediately explain itself. André Leroi-Gourhan once wrote that “the human hand is human because of what it makes, not what it is.” I took this to mean that we don’t always discover who we are by thinking harder; sometimes we have to make something and see ourselves reflected back in it.

I wasn’t interested in the hand as a servant to the brain, obediently executing instructions. I was curious to see what happens when the brain follows instead of leads — when thinking leaks into objects, and meaning shows up late. The longer I worked on the project, the more I noticed how obsessed we are with utility. We want things — and people — to declare their purpose immediately.

According to the Oxford Dictionary, an artefact is simply a thing made by art. And art, inconveniently, implies skill, practice, and time — not efficiency. I began to observe that there is no clear line between ornament and tool. Sometimes the tool is only for show. Sometimes the decorative thing does the real work. And sometimes the most interesting objects are the ones that don’t yet know what they’re good for. As Charles Eames once said: “My dream is to have people working on useless projects. These have the gems of new concepts.” Mute Little Goose became one of those projects — an open-ended prototype. A thought made physical. Not a solution, but a question you could hold in your hands. At one point, I imagined it becoming an ocarina — an ancient musical instrument shaped by breath and touch, whose Italian name derives from ucareina, meaning “little goose.” The idea felt intimate and slightly absurd. But the object resisted completion. It remained mute. Non-finito. And I understood that its silence was enough.
Michelangelo left many of his sculptures unfinished — not because he couldn’t finish them, but because some divine guidance hadn’t arrived yet. Non-finito as a form of faith. Which made me realize that creativity doesn’t come from mastery alone, but from incapacity — from not being able, or not being willing, to fully arrive.

When people encounter Mute Little Goose, they usually ask the same question: What is it? Or what is it for? What fascinates me isn’t the question itself, but the urgency behind it. Why do we need to know right away?

This year, my wish is not to be more productive, more disciplined, or more resolved. If Leopardi is right — if the good life is the one we are not yet acquainted with — then perhaps the most honest New Year’s wish is to remain available, to stay open.

Here I am to wish you a very happy 2026 — whatever it turns out to be. Let’s meet it slowly and stay a little longer with what we don’t yet know.