The more I make objects from clay, the more I realize my indebtedness to the painters, craftspeople and sculptors whose lives I continue to study. I depend upon their wisdom for a sense of well-being and stability in what feels like a chaotic world.

I was trained as a painter in private art schools in my youth and later in university and college art programs. In subsequent years, I worked intermittently as a painter and photographer. Along the way, I tried making pots a few times because I loved the ones in my collection. Always frustrated by the potter’s wheel, I spent a semester at a college in Vermont making hand-built and wood-fired vessels. These pots are similar to some of the work I make now.

The landscape in the Northeast and Southwest continue to be primary themes, and I find the music I listen to in the studio a powerful inspiration for particular pieces.  I love the green of Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, the red, gray and black mesas and night skies of New Mexico, pots that croon and sway and shapes that mimic desert and ocean forms. I like my pieces to be refined but off-kilter, recreating a tension that feels familiar to me from observing the natural world.

Ancient forms like Tibetan prayer wheels, Christian relics, old beads, Native American baskets and rare feathers, shells and stones are among my favorite studio objects.  Some of my pieces seem to come alive when they’re used to hold tulips, crow and turkey feathers, dried flowers and wood from the desert.

I began working with clay in 2014 when I moved to Utah from the Northeast. The community studio in Salt Lake City has a cone 10 gas kiln, and the atmospheric firings and traditional Japanese glazes shaped my clay practice and influenced the way my work looked. In 2021, I moved to New Mexico and joined a community studio that employs electric kilns and cone 5/6 glazes. The new technology ultimately altered the way I conceive and make my work. Many of the pieces feel more emotional, and I sometimes fear I’m wearing my heart on my sleeve, though the abstract images obscure easy interpretation and meaning. The mid-fire glazes, often poured free-form, feel more like skin on the dark clays I’ve found here in New Mexico. The new work is more sensual and painterly, taking me back to my beginnings as an artist.

I admire the humanistic abstract artists such as Anne Truitt, Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth and the remarkable work of Howard Hodgkin. The fiber and assemblage artists Lenore Tawney and Sheila Hicks have demonstrated the art of the possible. The early abstract drawings and watercolors of O’Keeffe and the paintings of Arthur Dove remain constant artistic companions. I’ve taken to heart O’Keeffe’s life lesson from Arthur Wesley Dow, to fill the space in a beautiful way, as well as Alfred Stieglitz’s idea that art can be equivalent to pure emotion and a person’s inner state of being.

Edmund de Waal’s installations reveal the enormous power of ceramics to convey meaning and soulfulness. The craftspeople who made early Buddhist work in India, the carved narratives and stupas, are endlessly inspiring to me. The anonymous tradition of Tantric painting in Rajasthan changed the way I saw abstract, symbolic images, and affirms my belief that sensuality, sexuality and spirit coexist in all of us.

In 2020, I decided to diversify my studio practice to include collages made from my cache of found photographs, rediscovered when I went through some boxes in storage during lockdown. I extended this endeavor in 2021, making collages and assemblages with my own altered digital photographs, porcelain components and found materials from the garden. I feel like I’ve gone back in time making these works from paper, my first love. Every one is a visual poem of remembrance, regret and longing.