about
I am a ceramic artist, raised in New York City, now living and working on the south side of Chicago. Through a process of hand-building and wheel-throwing I create abstract sculpture and installations, as well as functional objects and vessels. I use a variety of clays from red terra cotta to refined porcelain and coarse stoneware, depending on the piece. Applying ceramic slips, terra sigillata and glaze, I fire the work in either an electric oxidation or gas reduction kiln.
The work
My work centers on a visual language of line, volume, and shadow, and the creation of unexpected juxtapositions between objects in space. The display and reframing of things into ordered visual systems and topographies is fundamental to my practice. I am seduced by the raw malleability of clay and its transformation from wet lump to fragile object through the heat of the kiln. My inspirations are the every-day. As diverse as a jumble of rocks in a stone wall, the geometry of bricks in a building, a pattern of cracks in the sidewalk, the undulating view of a distant urban skyline or the horizon of Lake Michigan on a winter afternoon.
THE JOURNEY
I received a BA in english literature and then an AAS in interior design before settling into a job with an architecture firm in Watertown MA. After several years of working in residential and commercial design, I grew impatient with clients and paperwork and searched for a more hands-on creative outlet. Loving pattern, form, and materials, I landed in the community ceramics studio of Harvard University where I took classes in wheel-throwing. I never looked back. Eventually earning an MFA in Ceramics from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, I produce work in my home studio and have been an instructor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the University of Indiana Northwest and currently the Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago.
