artist's statement
Once long ago when I lived in a daylight world, the world being too much for me, I would
have gone to grass. Face downward and very close to the green stems, I became one with ants
and aphids and sow bugs, no longer a colossus. And in a ferocious jungle of the grass I found the distraction that meant peace.
- John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent, 1961
I grew up in the mountains of western North Carolina in a small community called Poplar. This tiny section of the southern Appalachian Mountains is marked with distinct seasons, from the richness and fullness of the succulent summer hills to the achingly bare and skeletal tree-scattered grayness of the winter. These seasonal changes hold their own agents of growth and decay, visible markers of the cycle of life. I grew up in this greater green world, with my head buried in the comic books that my dad collected. My childhood was a mixture of color and fantasy, filled with super heroes and alien beings, and the lushness of the rhododendron filled mountains. I spent hours leafing through comics, imagining worlds within worlds and encountering alternate universes and secret wars, all the while cicadas were singing and shedding their skin and whirring into the night air.
My ceramics are an amalgamation of the influences of my youth, the natural and the fantastical. My vessels provide a ceramic comic book interpretation of the natural world and its processes of growth and decay. I use thick line contours, a fullness of volume, and areas of exaggerated detail to embellish my functional ceramic vessels. I translate and abstract budding leaves and lichen encrusted bark, and assemble a collage of interpretations of the natural phenomena. I like to take bits and parts, magnifying some diminishing others and assemble them into a vessel worthy of use and destined for contemplation. Through my ceramic objects, I hope to relay a narrative of the natural world, focusing on the overwhelming visual and tactile information that seduces and causes me wonder.
First, picture the forest. I want you to be its conscience, the eyes in the trees....
Every space is filled with life...A single file army of ants biting a mammoth tree into uniform
grains and hauling it down to the dark for their ravenous queen. And, in reply, a choir of
seedlings arching their necks out of rotted tree stumps, sucking life out of death. This forest
eats itself and lives forever.
- Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible, 1998