Waiting for Child Care: Truth Across Modes of Representation
This ceramic stoneware sculpture presents findings from the 2025 Virginia Child Care Subsidy Waitlist Survey, conducted by the Study of Early Education through Partnerships research team at University of Virginia, where Fares works as a research data scientist. The survey asked families who had been on Virginia’s Child Care Subsidy Program waitlist between June 2024 and June 2025 how waiting for assistance affected their employment, financial stability, and children’s learning and development.
The sculpture consists of a curved dome, evoking both a bell curve and the human form, with a smaller figure positioned inside it. Each side of the dome presents the same underlying data differently. One side displays aggregated statistics, with small openings that provide only a limited view of the figure within. Two arched sides feature excerpts from families’ written responses to open-ended survey questions, offering a clearer but still partial view. The final side reveals only the individual figure, while obscuring the broader patterns represented by the quantitative and qualitative data.
Through these varied perspectives, the sculpture explores how choices about data presentation shape what viewers understand. Aggregated statistics, qualitative excerpts, and individual experiences can all convey truth, but each highlights some elements of reality while concealing others. Fares invites viewers to consider how methods of representation influence what data communicates and whose experiences remain visible within it.
Sources:
Study of Early Education through Partnerships. (2025, October). 2025 Virginia Child Care Subsidy Waitlist Survey: Preliminary Findings.
Isabelle Fares
Isabelle Fares was born and raised in Charlottesville, Virginia, before moving to Massachusetts to attend Wellesley College, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics. After college, she moved to Minneapolis, Minnesota, where she completed a term of public service with AmeriCorps and earned a Master of Public Policy degree from the University of Minnesota.
Fares returned to Charlottesville in 2021 and began working with the Study of Early Education through Partnerships research team at the University of Virginia School of Education and Human Development. As a research data scientist, she manages and analyzes large survey and administrative datasets related to early education policy, often in collaboration with partners at the Virginia Department of Education. Through this work, she has gained an appreciation for how decisions about data collection — including from whom data are collected, in what format, and for what purpose — shape what the data can ultimately tell us.
In 2022, Fares took her first ceramics class at City Clay in Charlottesville. Although wheel throwing did not come naturally to her at first, she grew to love the medium and continued taking wheel throwing and handbuilding classes there for several years. Fares now lives in Staunton, Virginia, with her wife, and has been a member of the Staunton Clayground ceramics studio since 2024. She creates both functional pieces, including mugs, bowls, and vases, and nonfunctional work, including sculptures, wall art, and garden décor. She is always looking for new ways to use clay.
