Years ago I came across a little book called The Merchant of Marvels, about a sorcerer who collects strange and wonderful objects, and this is how I think of Graceann Warn. I am looking at one of her pieces right now—it hangs on the wall behind my computer—and I notice that my eye keeps roving, around and around like a fly, landing first here, on a piece of ribbon, then on a row of glass disks (optical equipment she picked up on eBay, or was it a trip to the Caribbean? for she is a beachcomber and flea market trawler, a scavenger of oddities). My eye flits to a silver bead, then to a patch of dark paper with Gothic script and the gilded head of a bird, and finally to the word paraiso, typed faintly on a tiny pink envelope sealed with a small gray image of an urn.

I fall asleep most nights not far from another box by Graceann, an old wooden file drawer with a pair of luggage tags inside, except they are not proper tags but small collages whose components—stamps, train schedules, a city map, a wax seal—transport me to Paris. When I was little, my mother used to plant a dream in my mind each night by giving me the start of a story (never its end) as she tucked me into bed, and it occurs to me this is what such a box offers, the impetus for an imaginary journey.

Above my bed is still another of Graceann’s works, an encaustic whose layers of blood-red wax contain the following: a row of numbers, a blue bowl, a rectangle of gold, and a poem, barely visible, about prime numbers and a bowl of sunlight and the rapture. What I love about this work is the way it seems both contemporary and ancient. A palimpsest, of course, is what it is: a relic within which lie the traces of earlier relics, in a process that seems endless (think of Chinese boxes or Escher stairways). There is always something more to discover, and I’m not surprised to learn that when Graceann went back to school a few years ago it was to study classical archaeology, for what is a work like this if not a kind of burial mound that invites excavation? Its surface is both translucent and opaque—a result of the medium,

which involves the application of molten beeswax to a solid ground. The piece as a whole makes me think of an Egyptian sarcophagus, or of Pompeii, with its tantalizing fragments of human experience immortalized by heat.

It also suggests a retablo, an altarpiece to which I might return again and again, out of habit and devotion, in an effort to pry loose yet another revelation. I can almost hear it whispering, Come in, see what I have beneath my coat of many colors.

Gaston Bachelard writes of housewives who imbue an ordinary home with luster by their repeated polishing of domestic objects, and this is what Graceann does. She prompts you to look two and three times at something you might otherwise be tempted to dismiss, or take for granted, or kick back into the ocean because it seems worthless. But it is not, she says. Look again at this piece of wood, at this lens, at this wire coil. It has a story to tell. A private story, like the tale a child hears when she holds a seashell to her ear.

Listen to the words with which Graceann christens her work: Paradise. Utopia. Quench. Cielo. Six. Abacus. Pequod.

Look at the way she turns numbers into abstract ornaments, into scratchings from an alternate world.

Consider the strength she must have in her hands and arms to heft and saw and nail together slabs of wood, for she is more than a poet with a gentle vision, she is a carpenter and a chemist, a welder and an architect. She reminds us (especially those of us who spend our days staring at pixelated screens) of the pleasures of the tactile.

She is a traveler, a poet, a soothsayer, a storyteller, a merchant of marvels and a peddler of dreams, who with each new work creates an artifact to remind us who we once were, how we worshipped, what we cherished.