ARTIST STATEMENT

When I was in 5th grade, my parents took my brother and I to the Pueblo ruins at Mesa Verde, Colorado. In elementary school, we watched a movie about Maria Martinez firing her blackware with cow dung. This stirred my desire to create organic clay pieces and fire with smoke. Thus began my lifetime fascination with prehistoric ceramics, which I’ve continued to explore to this day.

I find these simple forms elegant and mysterious, living connections to ancient people whose lives and thoughts we can connect with through their artifacts. The timeless nature of their forms touches a deep place in my heart, inspiring me to capture and express that connection to the past in my own work.

I hand build my pieces using clay coils and slabs modeled with simple tools: scrapers made from credit cards and a bamboo paddle. The opening at the top of each vessel I make is important and involves much contem-plation, because it allows the piece to breathe and the form to continue beyond its solid structure, providing a portal into the unknown. To me, it produces the same feeling of continuity and connection I’ve experienced with prehistoric ceramics, adding to the vessel’s sense of timeless mystery. After shaping a vessel, I scrape and paddle the outer wall, allowing textures to remain.

Once I have applied colorants to my vessels’ surfaces, I complete them with a pit firing process using sawdust, wood and hay. For some vessels, I use the traditional raku process — finishing kiln-fired pieces within a matrix of combustible materials - for dramatic smoky and crackle effects.