Tell us about your practice and how you came to making?

I was the kid who dressed up as an artist on career day–with the little painter’s palette and beret and everything. But I largely walked away from creating art once I got into my 20s. I was dealing with a lot of family illness and grief at the time. From ages of 20 to 29 I lost my father, my best friend, and then my mother to different forms of cancer, and my priorities were largely focused on caregiving, followed by my own basic survival. I buried myself in my corporate career in advertising because I felt an urgency to be financially independent and take care of myself in lieu of the support system of an immediate family, but also because productivity was a good distraction from my feelings.

In my early 30s, I thought I had landed my dream job, but spoiler alert–very few of those actually exist, and this wasn’t one of them. I ended up quitting abruptly after two months, which was not my style at all. I was usually someone who stayed at jobs too long, and I always had a plan in place before walking away from a paycheck. For the first time in my life, I found myself without a plan, and it became very, painfully clear that I had been using work as a distraction from nurturing my basic human needs–including the one where creativity was a form of liberation for myself. This is the moment that ultimately brought me to taking my first pottery class, which has since become a deeply held and well-nurtured obsession.

My practice has evolved from a hobbyist making functional objects on the wheel, to a more diverse exploration of sculptural and functional ceramics created through a mix of handbuilding and wheel work. I view my practice as an expression of my autonomy. I think in a world where there’s pressure to commoditize and instrumentalize nearly everything, having a space to create the art I want to make feels like a liberating act. That said, the objects I make are intuitive, and it’s important to me to let them just be without applying any kind of message or political motive. They get to be what they are, without the pressure to perform–which after the experiences of my early adulthood, feels like freedom.

Do you have a ritual when it comes to making/designing work?

I’m pretty un-ritualized. My day job requires a lot of high-pressure deadlines and structure, and when it comes to my creative work, I pretty purposefully remove all pressures and strict structures around it. I think the only rule I have is that I have to honor my desire to be in the studio. I go through phases where I’m in there every day, but will also take a month or even a season off at the time if I need a creative reset. Sometimes the work is happening more subconsciously vs. something I’m engaging in actively, so I’m never in much of a dry spell as I’m honoring my own rhythm.

You told us about the history of quilting in your family. How does the intersection of craft and art play into your work?

My mother was someone who loved to be creative, but I think she lacked some confidence when it came to sharing those pieces of herself more widely. She went through phases of painting, mosaic-making, and towards the end of her life quilting–which is something at least one of my great grandmothers engaged in as well. 

I’m grateful for these objects now, as they’re very tactile documents of my mother’s spiritual and emotional existence. Her energy comes through in all of it–happy, colorful, and ornate, and in the case of the quilts, they’re living documents of the things and people she valued most.

I see my own work as a continuation of this practice. I’m drawn to craft traditions for the ways in which they represent a history of multiple people’s skills, hacks, and styles–the result of things learned in one-on-one settings, and then adjusted slightly to meet your own needs as an artist or artisan. All of those small tweaks compound and evolve over time, and I think they create a beautiful thread between generations that is somehow always wholly unique yet forever connected. The combination of skills with intuition means that in some ways, more than traditional fine art, and especially more than mass-produced goods, craft works manage to document both our collective and individual values and emotional experience–which feels increasingly urgent at a time when so much creative work is digitized, and therefore disconnected from the humanity of touch.

What brought you to working in clay? And what continues to inspire you about clay as you further your work?

When I was in highschool I was obsessed with drawing and photography. But at 34 years old, and slightly feral from the aftermath of a lot of grief and self-neglect, I had this urgent craving for something more physical–something that would pointedly force me out of my head. So I took an 8 week wheel throwing class, and I was really bad at it but I loved it, so I took another, and then another. I had no interest in handbuilding until I sprained my wrist learning how to ride a bike at the age of 40 (lol) and then couldn’t work on the wheel for a few weeks. The first things I made with my busted wrist were technically poor but artistically compelling vessels, and I realized that the expressive opportunities of handbuilding were what I’d really been craving.

Each piece is entirely unique, and usually made in a batch of work that feels connected. What types of themes are you exploring while you're making and how might those themes change the shapes/forms/finishes of your work from ‘collection’ to ‘collection’?

I consider myself fairly early in my larger artistic development–I’ve only been working with clay for 7 years–and I have a pretty short attention span. I tend to become obsessed with themes or ideas, often in a somewhat intuitive but not-entirely-articulated way, and explore those ideas for a while. I’ve created vessels and surfaces that were entirely improvised, inspired by dadaist themes of automatic art; explored surface motifs inspired by quilting, nature, and generational themes of tradition, growth, and death; found formal inspiration from archaic machinery, ancient vessels, and most recently, the entropy and maladaptation of the human body. I’d say all of it, at some point, overlaps in a loose venn diagram of three formative themes–my career in advertising and digital media, with which I’ve had a complicated relationship and which puts me in direct daily contact with the perceived disposability of creativity in our current culture; my experience of navigating “complicated grief” (that’s the medical term) from the loss of my core support system in my young adulthood; and the desire to engage in the cross-generational traditions of art and craft in a curious, genuine, and intuitive fashion. That last one means that I follow whatever the obsession is, for however long it lasts, and I don’t say “no” to an impulse because I don’t yet understand it, or because it may somehow seem “off-brand” in relationship to my other bodies of work. I do the things that bring me satisfaction, whether that’s making a mug for a friend, creating an experimental biomorphic vessel, or creating series of adorable little cat vases for charity, and I’m much less worried about doing something that seems creatively disjointed than I am about being true to my creative impulses.

You work with a lot of motifs of carving and almost excavation of the clay. Is this inspired as you're making the piece, or do you set out with these intentional drawings in mind?

Originally, my hand built pieces were entirely improvised, from form to surface. Over time, I’ve come to understand the medium more, and that understanding feels like this deep knowledge that I carry around inside of me that latches onto sparks of inspiration while I’m walking around or showering or going about by business in the world. So more and more I find myself wanting to get those thoughts down in the form of drawings and sketches. Regardless of whether a piece is conceived in the moment or has a bit of planning behind it, though, I embrace an intuitive approach to my work broadly, which means that I frequently change course mid way and allow things to come to be as they want to be.

With this exhibition, we’re exploring themes of the handmade and evidence of the handmade. How do you think your work explores those themes?

My work isn’t just incidentally handmade and one-of-a-kind. These characteristics are fundamental to the concepts and driving forces behind it. As I mentioned, I work in advertising, which is a field where your output is increasingly digital. There’s a term that’s used a lot by tech startups and financial clients–”frictionless”--which is meant to describe the consumer experience of removing any moments that may force someone to reconsider a purchase. This is the path of the evolution from counting out cash at a store, to writing a check, to swiping a credit card, to inputting your card number into the box on your computer, to clicking the Apple Pay button for instant purchase–the less you have to think about the purchase you’re making, the more likely you are to just make it.

I think the increasing lurch of society towards frictionlessness is the story of our disassociation with our innate human selves, as well as with the value of the things we create. People struggle to pay $30 for a mug that their neighbor made, but don’t blink when it comes to purchasing the $3 version from Amazon made by someone they don’t know, somewhere they’ve never been, under conditions which they’d rather not imagine. We need to look at why–beyond the basic economics of it all–it’s so easy to devalue human labor, and the objects it creates. We are being constantly, purposefully distracted from ourselves by mass manufacturers employing models of addiction as marketing plans. We participate in our own dehumanization.

This may seem divorced from what I’m doing–making wacky vases in my basement in the Hudson Valley for a decidedly niche audience–but it’s absolutely relevant to the choices I make in the process of their creation. I am always looking for ways to re-introduce friction to traditionally functional objects. An uneven, tactile surface, a spout turned upside down, or an awkwardly weighted vessel aren’t just aesthetic choices, but conceptual ones that seek to force the user’s attention back to their object, and therefore their relationship with it. Surface motifs that recall personal history or deploy improvisational designs are a reminder that there’s a human driving those decisions–a personal touch that acts as a grounding device for anyone who comes in contact with them.

What’s next for you? 

I’m currently a member of an artist-run gallery space in Beacon, NY called Super Secret Projects. I’m opening my first solo show there concurrently with the exhibition at Rude Haus, so hopefully what’s next is a bit of a breather, and an opportunity to get back to making some fun, smaller things for the holidays. I’ve enjoyed working in the more gallery- and interior design-focused spaces, they’ve felt like good fits for my work, so I’m hoping to expand my footprint on that front. As for the work, I’m in a bit of a fallow moment right now. I’m percolating on some nascent ideas, and we’ll see which ones feel the most exciting when it comes time to hunker back down in the basement studio again–I’m not sure yet myself.