Vases, Sculpture, & Containers

Artist Statement

Flowers occupy a place both on the forager’s dinner plate and as a medium for social communication, encompassing love, lust, healing, envy, ire, sympathy, and hope.

"Craft" and "Clay" reside in a similar liminal space between fine art and what is 'hobby', while remaining present and often functional in our daily lives.

Though relatively new to pottery, as a maker and professional floral designer, I am intrigued by the intersections of biology and biological forms in art and the thoughts they inspire. Flowers and clay represent an irresistible combination of earth and the processes of both life and time: Terra & Flora.

Each object I create starts as a seed in my garden or is foraged from local spaces. These plants, at various growth stages, are chronologized and recorded as impressions in plaster molds. They later become expressions in clay, shaped into sculptures for everyday use with an eye for movement, quirky beauty, and ritual function.

Present in this work is an ongoing connection to nature and specifically flowers, a recording of place, time, and landscape, a desire to re-interpret these already complex life forms, and a re-placing and re-presenting of them in relation to the art object and the user.

While the question is present in my work, I am not interested inquiring what flowers truly are or what the purpose and value of clay as a craft or fine art is. Instead, I invite viewers to tumble around in meaning and form with me, admiring and marveling at the complexities and layers of meaning these processes offer.

It is enough for me to fill a vase created from clay pressed into plaster molds of last year’s roses with this year’s roses.