Artist Statement

I create lush ceramic forms that lurk in the fluid spaces between botany, creature, human. In 2021, I was awarded an artist’s residency at the Hambidge Center in Georgia. The intensity and joy of that experience, along with an empty nest, inspired me to earn my MFA in Ceramics at Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2024. Despite my age and decades of working in Ceramics, I feel like an emerging artist all over again. I welcome this transformation and see it as an intrinsic part of my practice.

 

Using the natural world as a starting point, I play with mimicry and metaphor, exploring, for example, how the nectary in a plant might relate to a mother’s lap, a woman’s womb, a secret hiding place and the ceramic vessel itself. I often begin with traditional vessels and then disrupt the form with unexpected growths or attachments. For me, these “offspring” serve as a documentation of what it means to belong or what it means to stand apart. I see my role as maker and mother as deeply intertwined, both rooted in the essence of craft. For me, making is an act of caregiving, complicated in its beauty and burden. It requires intense labor, repetition, and rigor. It allows me to exert control while forcing me to be open to the wayward element: a moment of magic in the process of building, glazing or firing. Ultimately, there is a subtle power in this work: An object that refuses to be just one thing has a unique capacity to expand the imagination. As an artist starting out later in life, I am deeply interested in how the world is full of fluidity and transformation.