Artist Statement

      I feel compelled to create ceramic sculptures that explore relationality within the personal relationships around us and through companionship with the audience. The process of creating the sculptures commemorates and mimics their moment of existence, even if brief, and the way they’ve informed my life. Memory inherently informs the work because I rely on recalling and understanding a memory or relationship so profoundly that the emotion conveyed is understood to the audience on a visual level. As humans, we desire comfort which is supportive and balancing- but it can become enabling and exhausting when we become dependent upon it.

     The dependency between forms uses aesthetic elements to explain the relationship on a visual level focusing on the interaction between sculptures. I hollow build ceramic sculptural forms, adding coil after coil, smoothing each until they have incorporated into the body. The surface of the form helps convey the emotions through the use of texture and atmospheric finishes. The viewer can see the contrast in comfort between supportive and exhausting relationships clearly through the atmospheric firings’ dualistic qualities. The intense heat and process of cone ten firings are almost quintessentially completed by the ash’s delicate finishing caressing the forms like dew. While these firings push the pieces into a new quality of the material through this grueling process, other atmospheric finishes create results with a softer quality due to the lack of harsh environments exposed. To incorporate atmospheres not typical to ceramics continues the exploration of emotions elicited by the forms’ surface. The idea of memories disappearing while relationships between people also face over time pushes my desire to capture some in an almost diary- like manner. Capturing emotions while they’re fresh versus memories of long departed relationships results in a difference in the strength of feeling which radiates from the work .