Artist Statement

Life abounds with contradiction. Alongside its patterns and principles, it offers ambiguity, paradox, and tensions that resist resolution — experiences to be managed rather than solved. Metaphor has always been my way into those harder truths. A love of stories led me to the library, where Greek myths, Egyptian pharaohs, Chinese folklore, and the Cherokee and Irish parables from my own heritage were waiting. My love of nature and animals made their symbolism electric — it gave me the imaginative space I needed to approach what I couldn't face directly.

In all these cultures and throughout art history, anthropomorphism has been a prevalent thread, reflecting an elemental human tendency to project ourselves onto the animals and concepts around us. Like many of my creative predecessors, I envisage my inner world through anthropomorphized animals, playing out my experiences and struggles through them. They become a mirror of my life—one I can look at more easily because it is reflected in a form different from my own. Non-human figures sidestep the immediate barriers that human figures introduce—race, body type, and other markers that foster distance rather than connection—allowing viewers to enter the work on their own terms.

Animals are my ideal vehicle for allegory because they exist closer to the visceral, emotional place where my experiences live, unburdened by the layers the human animal uses to distance itself from raw feeling. The archetypes attributed to each animal carry thousands of years of global cultural heritage and insight, and I use this rich symbolism as the scaffolding upon which each piece is built. Combined with traditional techniques like pit firing and obvara, as well as paints, dyes, and industrial materials, the resulting surfaces are activated into nuanced and unpredictable expressions—a combination of intention and happenstance, effort and entropy, ancient and modern, that embodies the paradoxes I am eager to explore.

The physicality of hand-building in ceramics keeps me grounded in the process of making. With this dialect, I tease out how to articulate paradoxical moments in physical form that catalyzes my comprehension. When my conscious mind comes up short, the voice of the clay keeps the conversation going—its emergent properties reinforcing the dialog in poetic ways that I humbly observe and hope to emulate in future works, so that I may investigate and appreciate the next experience more fully.