• Shadows are created by darkness, an object or figure obscuring the light. In this work, I explore the possibility of transforming darkness or adversity into something humorous, even hopeful. My favorite shadows have always been those made by painlessly contorted hands forming the shape of an animal, a grumpy man, or some other silly thing. The hand in this piece stretches, reaches, and compresses as it forms the puppet's silhouette. That physical tension mirrors the emotional effort required to maintain hope during dark times. Holding the gesture is not effortless; it strains and shifts, just as we do when navigating struggle. Yet from that very pressure emerges a recognizable form—a shadow puppet, simple, familiar, and universally producible. By employing shadow as both medium and metaphor, I am not aiming to escape the darkness but to work with it. Even within constrained or obscured conditions, we can create something playful, something gentle, something that helps us remember joy.

  • My sculptural work reflects my personal awe of nature.

  • Using clay as a record of time and touch, I make objects that serve as a reflection of landscape and place, focusing on how they grow and decay over time. Forms are made slowly with consideration to volume and breath, often blooming outward. I use the kiln as a means of compressing time to weather these forms, exploring the alchemical nature shared between ceramic materials and the ever-changing landscape. By firing and cooling in reduction, it forces iron from within the clay to gather on the exterior surface, as if pulling blood from a stone. This creates a variety of surfaces on the work from quiet and rustic to bright flashes of iron. These objects tell their story through the information left from the processes of making and firing—growing and decaying.

  • I explore the complexities of interpersonal relationships; specifically, the spatial and supposed interaction between two or more persons caught in a single moment of time. Through the process of breaking down and deconstructing the figure into smaller more intimate aspects of a body’s posture the emphasis is redirected to the non-descript area between, creating a permanent shifting state of tension.

  • Conversations on lawful residency are nuanced and complex, wherein solutions must be approached with humanity, morality and rational compassion. This sculpture installation confronts the impact of intolerant speech on marginalized communities, making societal aggression and vitriol tangible. A young woman is partially “buried” in the ground, demonstrating her vulnerability to her circumstances. Embodying language as material and kinetic, she is surrounded by ceramic “rocks” inscribed with quotes from contemporary and historical leaders about immigrants and immigration. She shields herself with an expression of disbelief, fear and horror, drawing a parallel between physical violence and the capacity of words to wound, marginalize, and dehumanize. With the weight of words made visible, viewers are invited into a dialogue reflecting on empathy, responsibility, and the enduring power of language to shape, define and constrain the realities we live in.

  • My work originates from anxiety about an uncertain future and a desire to escape reality. As a student, imagination became both a refuge and a means of survival, leading me to question how art could create value. Choosing to live as an artist felt unstable, yet persistence has remained central to my practice. I reinterpret forms found in everyday life through my own visual language, creating ceramic works that connect imagination and experience. Anthropomorphic forms, accumulation, and questions of value and existence are key elements of my work. My practice uses the accumulation of small beings to metaphorically explore the relationship between individuals and society, individuality and community, showing how personal lives and values collectively shape the world. I continue to explore the intersection of imagination and reality, art and life, striving each day to live in my own form.

  • I design intuitively, allowing each piece to unfold organically—rules arise in response to form, not in advance. Every decision shapes the next. Joy, whimsy, and beauty guide my process. I experiment with form and surface, translating the textures and gestures of my surroundings into expressive designs. My goal is to create work that surprises, delights, and connects. Currently I use a white mid temperature clay body fired to cone 5 oxidation. Pieces are made by a variety of methods such as throwing, slab work, extrusions, casting, and hand building. Decorating with pulled handles, attached multiple pieces, textured with presses, slip trailing, stains and glazes.

  • The beauty in the struggle, the end results, the seeming chaos—the chance of life, the millions of possibilities with all the combinations available. What makes a living being so special? Finding your place in life. Life made by choice. There is a no guarantee win.

  • The luminosity held in watercolor, ink, and porcelain carries the sorrow of ambiguous loss. Together, they render unresolved grief. The painting and object existing in conversation, searching and finding, claiming and concealing, their boundaries left to ambiguity. I make installations that ask questions about loss that can never be fully answered. My drawings enter the space where something is gone but not absent. Repetitive, searching gestures trace what cannot be held, allowing images to shift, erode, and coalesce over time.

  • This installation of 11,862 handmade ceramic heartstones forms an expressive “Heartstone River,” with each stone representing a reported hate crime in 2023. Crafted from natural clays in a rich array of earthy hues, each unique stone reflects the diversity of those impacted and makes visible the individuality behind each statistic. Laid out in a flowing, streamlike pattern, the piece transforms dark facts and figures into a tangible, human-scale experience, inviting reflection on both the impact of social vitriol and the resilience of those whose lives have been touched by it. Visitors are invited to participate by writing the name of a loved one or sharing their own story on additional heartstones, which they can then add to the river, creating a living, interactive experience that affirms love in the face of intolerance. By giving form and presence to these numbers, the artwork cultivates a safe space for contemplation and conversation, expanding the potential for personal and collective empathy, connection and healing.

  • I have always appreciated detail in objects. I grew up in an era obsessed with Star Wars and the "magic" of the miniatures used to create it and other movies of the seventies and eighties. The Simulacra required to bring realism to the big screen before the days of AI became engrained into my aesthetic. For as long as I can remember I have felt a need to create objects with repetitive elements and attention to detail in homage to these childhood memories. In the creation of these objects I can approach the "play" of childhood and shut out the din of the responsibilities of adulthood. In college I explored as many different methods and materials as I could find. I dabbled in blacksmithing, bronze casting, jewelry making, wood working, and fiber structures as well as drawing, painting, and sculpture. My work is centered on nature, not just a cursory look at nature, but a sustained deeper seeing of the "little things".

  • I create beautiful, thoughtful, and emotionally satisfying clay sculptures, using human and animal figures, nature imagery, and abstraction. I hand-build my sculpture from stoneware clay and build up surfaces over 3–4 firings. My work centers around the human search for authenticity and belonging. I am addressing the problem of being disconnected from the land, wild creatures, and intuition. My work also speaks to modern identity, or where we are truly at home when much of ancestral culture may have dissolved, been actively destroyed, or is one in which we do not wish to be a part. This can create a "hole" in our identity, but no matter our human history, we can find ancestors all around us—in the small and large organisms of the earth, in the trees, and the dirt. Through this "primal memory," we can envision and foster a future of health.

  • I am struck by the endurance of living things and the sometimes galling absurdity of their mechanisms to adapt physically, of course, but also emotionally. As the son of an immigrant tool and die maker who was permanently paralyzed in a factory accident, my work investigates the body in a state of metamorphosis, struggling to adapt to challenges and hostilities originating within the body and also from an unpredictable and evolving environment. My work draws on human, animal, and botanical forms—awkwardly but heroically blending anatomical reasonings and reinventions. Hybrid and ambiguous, their appendages emerge more like clusters of mushrooms than articulate fingers. Some appear wrapped in loosely applied bandages, signaling a wound—something missing, something compensated for. A physical and emotional unraveling. More than human, they are mortal—struggling, vulnerable, mutable, and in an arrested state.

  • I have developed a love for clay, especially hand building. However, I have sought to expand my art to include assemblage art, painting, and mixed media. Forming three-dimensional constructs has afforded me the freedom to alter and make physical changes to the objects and sculptures within those constructs. My artistic practice is whimsical, generating playfulness on the surface. The different materials create layers of color, texture and shapes. This begins the process of my assembling, glazing, and resin which fuses two-dimensional and three-dimensional elements. Narratives are a common theme in my art. In this series, I explore the idea of aging, reliving the past and how it pertains to the present. The creative process is important to me; it not only gives me a sense of calm and connects me to my inner self as well as to the outer environment. As my work progresses it takes on a life of its own. And the materials I select contribute to my overall vision.

  • I explore the power of storytelling. Using my personal experience of mundane life and struggles of contemplating our purpose in the vast universe, I encourage viewers to recognize the shared human experience of living and learning how to be a person. I approach my work with an "anti-purist" mindset, using a combination of traditional and experimental methods, incorporating found and reappropriated materials into my art.

  • I create objects and installations using clay, fiber and found or repurposed materials. Driven by materiality, I combine textures to explore points of physical, sensual and conceptual tension. My process relies on a sort of adaptive resonance theory, wherein form is inspired by misperception or the distortion of memory over time. I assemble, carve, stitch, and weave together seemingly disparate organic shapes and materials until something otherworldly yet viscerally familiar almost breathes before me. In my manipulation of clay, fiber and found materials, I find myself working through events and experiences that provoke the deepest emotional responses in me. I can be confronting a case of personal loss or grief, or exploring a social issue that confuses, angers or inspires me. This framing can be the structure that dictates my choice of materials and process. But it can also remain completely indiscernible, even to my own busy hands.

  • Through my work, I create a world of blurred boundaries, where ceramic sculptures merge with other materials and natural elements, holding the viewer in a fluid landscape suspended between discomfort and beauty, the familiar and the unknown. At the heart of this work lies a question: how can I reconcile a sense of belonging while living in constant displacement—physically uprooted, emotionally exiled, and always becoming? My practice grows from experiencing transformative thresholds and self-discovery. By manipulating the human figure alongside natural elements, I explore the physical and emotional dimensions of transformation: change, exile, displacement, and the quiet ache of uprootedness. The body becomes central, not only as form but as a vessel for self-reflection. Influenced by dreams, Surrealism, and my Mexican heritage, I create visual narratives that guide viewers across thresholds—between spaces, time, and worlds—where identity remains fluid and layered.

  • My work strives to continue the ceramic craft tradition of wheel thrown vessels but moves beyond what we perceive as domestic objects to those that speak of aesthetic of form and my interest in patterns and textures of the landscape. They become records of experiences I have had in nature. I condense and abstract my visions of these experiences so that the work becomes less representational. This reductive method allows for the form to embody a journey's record and perhaps a contemplative moment for the viewer. Each piece is handmade by me with no digital aids and any carvings and/or cutouts done by hand. My work is not about a process or a glaze; they are to express a sense of quiet, balance, and ties with the natural world.

  • My work begins with the chemistry of expansion, treating ceramic materials as dynamic reactive systems. I view the studio as part laboratory and part playground. The kiln becomes my collaborator as I balance precise material formulation with my enjoyment of experimentation. I developed a foaming ceramic material that I shape using slabs, coils, and casting techniques. I use chemical properties as sculptural tools, treating glaze as an expanding, shape-shifting mass. While I formulate the material's chemistry, the kiln dictates the final form. In this sense, I view the kiln as a collaborator in configuring a balance between structure and collapse. I navigate the tension between control and surrender, knowing the kiln may deliver a defined structure or a collapsed form slumped onto the kiln shelf. This process-driven research expands my understanding of the material's behavior, with each piece emerging from the kiln as an artifact of specific experimental conditions and outcomes.

  • My current work is an investigation of migration and residual ancestral memories that examine space and place of human existence. Geographical landscapes have provided resources for the continuous mobility of humans to create build communities and construct abodes. I'm constantly going back and forth to gather pieces of abandoned structures left to the atmospheric elements that blend the historical chronology of rural to urban human migration. Relics usually have associations with objects, or heirlooms, or parts of a body. I use historical ceramic figurines and other ceramic objects that once held value or importance to a group of people and reduce them rubble/shards. The structures produce a visual silence, evoke the imagination, offer notions of commodities and value, and illustrate a sense of desperation that provides insights to various cultural practices and traditions.

  • My ceramic sculptural series aims to create a dialogue about our current climate crisis. I work in porcelain for its suppleness, delicacy and strength. Porcelain’s willingness to be transformed, both in form and texture makes it a perfect medium for exploring the concept of protection and awareness. Bleached coral headdresses crown human figures that echo the fragility of dying reefs. Traditional Japanese tattoos are inked across their bodies, which speak to endurance and determination. Lifeless fish are scattered amongst them, symbolizing ecological collapse. My sculptures become monuments to loss and resilience. My goal is to inspire those who see my work to examine the world beneath the surface of our oceans. To reflect on how our choices can shape the future, that can help heal our reefs for generations to come.

  • As an artist, I view my role as an act of service, continually exploring how my work can best support others. My ceramic vessels serve as vehicles for investigating human connection and highlighting the disconnection prevalent in contemporary America. I am deeply concerned about the side effects of corporate capitalism, such as dehumanization and isolation, which arise from viewing individuals as disposable commodities. Central to my practice is an exploration of community, expressed through tactile mark-making. By working with clay and engaging in collaborative public participation, I emphasize the physicality of the hand, and the personal touch embedded in each piece. This approach allows my work to become an archive of the uniqueness and evidence of the human hand. These vessels can be used functionally or displayed in installations, conveying moments of sharing and contemplation. In this way, the vessel serves as both a literal and metaphorical object of unity.

  • My work is an exaggeration of female gender expression in romance and intimacy. Inspired by romantic cliches and primping rituals, I create exaggerated monuments to hyper-femininity. The work critiques the unquestioned adherence to looking feminine, as I argue that it causes gender expression to become narrowed for the purpose of appealing to men. Ultra-pinkness, lace, and rhinestones amass as reminders to the viewer of what visuals have been determined to represent the female experience. Maximalist decoration engulfs viewers in layers of frills and whipped cream like the pink sensory overload girls experience from birth in media, toys, clothes, and more. I use repeated symbols to create pieces that speak to both my personal relationship with femininity, love, and gender, and universal ones to offer viewers a chance to reflect on their own relationship with gender expression.

  • Engagement with Raku for over forty years has continually opened new potentials and accomplishment in the pursuit of discoveries not sought. Stretchings of clay around hope, history, experience, material and anticipation have brought the discovery of things not sought.

  • My pottery invites you to enter the places we call home. Through my architectural designs, it's been my life's work to draw out what people need to belong and experience peace through sense of place, flow, and relationship between home and nature. This year I have expanded my representations to include other architecture being inspired by recent trips to Puerto Rico and Chicago. Through imagery, I illustrate some of the rooms where we gather, entertain and take respite. These spaces offer a place of belonging and peace from the outside forces—from the many moments we encounter in life, ranging from joy to pain. I pay tribute to these spaces that can encompass both private meditation and community place. Seen through the fragments/Beauty beckons past the pain/Wholeness waits beyond

  • My work explores the beauty and horror of our existential uncertainties as creatures seeking meaning. The work addresses design elements from 18th and 19th-century European slipcast porcelain. The historical work that inspires me presents a criterion for beauty that often seems empty in regard to contemporary considerations regarding the human condition. Although much of the work I am inspired by involves the use of production techniques, my pieces are created with the immediacy and individuality attributed to hand processes and alternative firing methods. I place an emphasis on making ceremonial pieces that speak to the passage of time and embrace the propensity for ceramic vessels to be heirloom objects. The work seems to suggest that it bears witness to the ebb and flow of civilizations, of ideas, and of people.

  • My work is influenced by my rural childhood, spent playing outside, and foraging for dewberries. Through my art I encourage empathy and connection with the more-than-human world. I learn from nature and place by being outdoors and using methods of embodied learning. While spending time in a place, I collect materials such as clay, plants, and sounds. I make paper, inks, and natural dyes from harvested plants. I harvest local clays for my ceramic sculptures. My work takes the form of mixed media sculptures, poetry, and social practice projects. Previous projects have focused on themes such as loss of ecological knowledge and connection, invasive species, and habitat restoration. I continue to explore art's potential for healing and positive cultural shifts.

  • My work explores elements of constructing a sense of place through the layering, mediation, and remediation of information. This in turn opens questions of the natural and artificial experience of landscape, the picturesque, and the romantic notions of the sublime. Within my work, place exists as an idealized space, a space where specific infrastructure and architecture are stripped away, replaced by my own mimetic constructions. I am interested in the visual elements of the natural world, those that act as bookends for our experiences with sky and ground. Ultimately, I wish the work to induce a form of transportative experience; for the viewer to be placed at the axis point of a vast panorama of nostalgia and expectation, the past and future, distance and adjacency, longing and satisfaction.

  • Personal myths and mystical objects help me make sense of experiences that impact my body and mind but are beyond my control. I approach the unknown and challenge the status quo using fiction and invention. My imagery includes samplings of objects, materials, and beliefs from Western and Eastern traditions. Using female intuition I fabricate narratives, seeking to connect that which will bring new meaning to tired ways of thinking and living. Sculptural hybrid forms provide a vehicle for sharing my perspective and exorcising my fears.

  • Historically, figurative sculpture and portraiture were used to honor powerful and esteemed members of society. My focus is to combine traditional portraiture with subjects that are often overlooked in modern society. By recognizing them in sculpture, the work both honors the neglected and challenges traditional ideals of importance and value. I work with the figure because of its visual familiarity and because of its uncompromising presence when it exists in space with us. Clay is the material for the figure because of the qualities it embodies in wet, dry, and fired states, which can represent the vulnerable and malleable nature of human life. Wet clay is a metaphor for the potential in human beings for growth and a possible "molding" of one's life into something beautiful and significant. And the transformative power of fire makes the once fragile clay everlasting.

  • A source of life, ritual, and architecture, water has travelled with me like a companion, city to city, country to country. Or I have been invited instead, to witness its scarcity and abundance, to listen, to talk, to see, to reflect.

    A ghat is a series of steps leading down to a body of water, used for bathing, washing, and performing rituals.

    My ceramic practice is an act of collecting memories from the fragments of daily life. Born and raised in the sacred city of Haridwar, India, along the holy river Ganga, I was immersed in a landscape of mythology, temple ruins, and cultural objects. Some of my most cherished childhood memories are of bedtime stories with my father, where I would choose everyday objects or animals as characters, and he would weave them into mythological tales, creating new worlds within the ordinary. These core childhood memories have profoundly shaped my current art practice.

    I draw inspiration from architectural forms, the cultural landscape of India, and the everyday objects that continue to shape my surroundings. Using handbuilding techniques, I reconstruct these memories into familiar forms with surfaces that convey the passage of time. I develop these surfaces in an electric kiln, replicating rust, weathering, and corrosion. These transformations blur the line between the new, the abandoned, and antiques preserved in museums, revealing how even the simplest objects can carry profound stories.

  • My work explores the beauty and horror of our existential uncertainties as creatures seeking meaning. The work addresses design elements from 18th and 19th-century European slipcast porcelain. The historical work that inspires me presents a criterion for beauty that often seems empty in regard to contemporary considerations regarding the human condition. Although much of the work I am inspired by involves the use of production techniques, my pieces are created with the immediacy and individuality attributed to hand processes and alternative firing methods. I place an emphasis on making ceremonial pieces that speak to the passage of time and embrace the propensity for ceramic vessels to be heirloom objects. The work seems to suggest that it bears witness to the ebb and flow of civilizations, of ideas, and of people.

  • Ever since the Woolsey fire swept through my neighborhood in late 2018, I have been making pieces that reflect the destructive force of wildfires. In this pursuit, the stark consequences of climate change have been referenced in a range of forms, from geometrically abstracted shapes to more realistic scraffito pieces. Recently my work has centered on birds and reptiles situated in burning environments. These vessels function as a commemorative reminder of all that has been lost to the ravages and whims of these cataclysmic disasters. In addition, these natural elements and creatures function as a mirroring metaphor for the complexity and conflicts within my own interior world.

  • This work deals with current political issues, winning trophies, unfathomable tragedy, and the frustration of ignorance. As we know, trophies are often the spoils for, or from "winning" with it being a visual reminder of the others loss. With so much "winning" lately, these trophies are relating to a dark time in history: Nothing happy here, nothing to celebrate. The way some individuals or groups choose to see the pandemic and current politics is confusing to me. So many people living in a cult type mentality, people being murdered while protesting, others spreading wild rumors and misinformation, many denying science in their own search at the farm feed store for ways to beat a global pandemic, and/or while others thinking they were being microchipped instead of protected. Get out the aluminum foil hats and send your Thoughts and Prayers up with balloons. All hail the Google machine, social media, misinformation, ignorance, and arrogance.

  • My vessel sculptures make use of this convergence of familiar and ambiguous to bring forth a sense of obscurity. The work has an open-endedness which relies upon the viewer’s creativity and imagination to strive towards resolution. I experience pareidolia while I manifest my work in my studio, this tendency to remake the abstract into something recognizable, is compelling and creates a sense of excitement for me as I create. These moments do not always directly translate when seen, as people bring their own visual experiences when investigating these objects. I find elation in the idea that abstractions and arrangements of forms can allow for individualized narratives, or sense of familiarity, to be arrived at through viewing.