Recent gestures

Gestures from 2024 Relay Ridge Solo Show, Knoxville, TN

Wood Fired wild clays from Cub Creek Foundation residency 2023/24

“Miscommunications” Somewhere between handbuilding and pottery language. A nod to the way we misguide communication through gesture

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Raw notes of emotional expression

My ceramic practice began 20 years ago in a therapeutic and play based approach. I translate the entangled human experience in clay, and my body collaborates with material to create a kind of ecdysis: a shedding of attachment and recombinance. From a position of mutual porosity- I absorb lessons clay teaches me of patience and listening, free from vitrification and the promise of permanence.

I wedge, pull, squeeze, melt, and press into this soft musty material until it folds and stretches like the human body, isolating gestures of expression. Each piece is weft in a broad web, resulting in a breadth of language, ranging in a progression blend of thrown functional wares to figurative representational and interactive relational installation. The gestures of building these forms are oriented in the actions of touch and thus the work is saturated with the energy of making.

They are most often built in rotation, and figurative elements run into one another as they wrap in the round, coming together as a conglomerate body indiscernible where one begins and the other ends. My interactive installations are built as pieces, parts of a rearrangeable whole, are then fired and glazed, waxed in cold finish, often sandblasted and come together again through participation. The physicality of the ceramic process is then carried into the space as invitations of interactivity and opportunities of play or communion.

Drawing individuals and observing people en masse is essential to my practice. I have spent life among crowds and recombinant families as particles in continuous rearrangement, likened to water or sand. I use this understanding of building, breaking, and rebuilding relationships, entanglements, and nonverbal communication as references in the studio for the way bodies connect through the physical vulnerability of emotional porosity.

We, Rain 2022

“Where I End and You Begin” is a recurring entangled form which follows the gestural action of hands folding into one another, signing in motions of tenderness, reception, and formal fluidity. I start by rendering a series of hands which are unfamiliar with one another, piling them into each other, compressing the soft clay into a tangled mass. The surface is flexible, sometimes cold finished in waxes, raw and bright, or crater glazes, molten and encrusted, with blurred edges, to amplify the soft strength of vulnerable participation within a community.

My work is inspired by Jenny Kendler, Sun Koo Yuh, and Beth Cavener; all artists who consider connection in deep relationship to the body, land, and tenderness of being. Clay has a connection to time and reception, it responds similarly to human touch the way another's body might, in the way we rely on human touch, we share responsibilities of impact. My work is formed around navigating interpersonal relationships and witnessing the way we are in continuous partnership rather than souls in isolation, encouraging the potential within collaborative action and mutual aid.