Being an artist is not merely performing a set of technical practices but is more plainly a way of being, relying on filtered sensations of an essentially aesthetic nature, as a provocation for literally making ones way in the world. Pottery is a unique category of aesthetic objects which combine the visual and tactile in an encounter of intimate space and personal proximity, charged by the relationships of the scale and grasp of the human body. Like our temporal (corporeal) bodies, a pot is created, contains in its volume during its lifetime, and will eventually enter into broken non-being by abrupt accident or the passage of sufficient time. Concern with a sculptural, formal articulation premised on the human body’s configuration, referencing the historical context of pots as quintessential props in the pragmatic theater for nourishing that body, and acknowledging the attendant social structures that have evolved around such use are the over-arching concepts that inform my work as a potter and artist. This interfusion is achieved by an aesthetic hierarchical formal composition of the features of the pot (i.e. lip, foot, belly, neck, etc.) which serve to express each pot’s potentials for promoting, reflecting, or memorializing the life of the body, layered meanings as the primary function of each pot transcending mere utility.

The sustained body participating in a qualitative variety of involving social situations is, therefore, an inexhaustible source of ideas for making pottery objects. This is because the realm of formal expressive possibilities, if any are to be postulated in a work of art, require a continual reworking to adequately attempt to address the unrealized coceivabilities of a subject. With each new work, my desire is sharpened to create more contingent pot objects as a willing, full participant in a meaningful, authentic transcendent process of ongoing expressive anticipation.

My sculptural pots are ewers (pouring vessels) which permit giving and receiving, containing then dispensing, and therefore suggest related social transactions as additional dynamic meanings. Gender is referenced via these notions of performance as as well as the display of unmistakable anatomical analogies of projecting spouts and pregnant swelling volumes. Surface texture and color, as would cosmetic adornments, uniforms or costumes, provoke meaningful associations within the viewer. Titles of works can interject irony, seasoning the viewer’s experience of these ceramic surrogates, communicating specific aspects of the general human condition. As aesthetic means for wish fulfillment may these pots serve to exorcize the spurious in our behavior while making the viewer aware of the way pottery can resonate with our own embodiment and enhance perceptions in the world of being. Making these pots is, therefore, an act of faith before it is one of skill, a heuristic process rather than an algorithm, and a significant part is recognition of serendipity when it appears in the midst of concerted intentionality.