Artist Statement
For many years I worked as a potter but I still feel a real kinship with the vessel. I love the way vessels can be representative of many things: they can reference domestic life, they can operate as stand-in’s for the human body, they can be story telling mechanisms, and through the shards of vessels we understand past civilizations and cultures.
Lately I have been influenced by the French ceramicist Bernard Palissy. Palissy was an artist living the mid 16th century and made life casts of his environment and applied them onto decorative vessels. He did this not out of technical prowess, but as a means to better understand the world around him. As a protestant, he was unconvinced by Catholic ideas of creationism and was convinced there was more to the world around him than what was visible. Palissy felt through a sensual examination of nature, it could bring one closer to the divine.
Living in the city, I can often feel removed from the natural environment. When people speak of euphoric encounters of spiritual significance in their environment, they often mean out in solitude away from civilization, like Henry David Thoreau. I have been making vessels and wall panels to speak to the ways in which, like Palissy, I can speak to moments of divine beauty and contemplation by using what I see and experience in the world around me. A broken cup, a discarded Kleenex, a piece of chewing gum stuck on the sidewalk – these things are the detritus of my world and I try and see both beauty and the divine in them. I want to use them as a way of understanding my both my existence and my mortality.