Artist Statement
My work as a ceramic artist is centered on hand-built porcelain. Employing a slow, methodical approach, my process explores human touch, natural occurrence, and the uncanny.
Kaolin, the primary component in porcelain, arises organically over the course of millennia as a byproduct of decaying granite. In using porcelain and volcanic temperatures to create rocks, I am returning the material to a semblance of its prior form, thereby obscuring centuries of intervention and human relationship to the material. This is a central paradox explored in my work: the use of my own gestures to conceal themselves. When I hand-build a form, its surface is adorned with fingerprints, suggesting softness; when I subsequently chisel these imprints away, the piece resembles unhewn stone.
My process repurposes prevailing techniques to erase the evidence of human interference. The objects I create possess a sense of material autonomy and natural presence. Mine is at once an additive process of elaborate ornamentation, and a subtractive measure of paring down to minimal material purity.
In working with the most translucent clay body available, I perform a final act of material subversion. Lit from within, or from above, these works emit a supernatural yet warm light that undercuts one’s intuitive understanding of the medium.