My practice begins outside. I collect angular, pointed rocks from hikes and drives through the California landscape, the desert floor of the Coachella Valley and the dry hills outside Los Angeles. Bringing them into the studio as temporary molds. I arrange the stones until the composition feels right, press a half-inch thick slab of clay over them, and compress the surface to capture their edges and texture. When the slab firms enough I flip the form, remove the slab from the rocks and begin building upward. The process is improvisational but not undisciplined. It is a puzzle, and the material makes its own demands clear.
The recurring challenge is attachment. Clay of different dryness does not want to join, and the attempts to emulate a landscape that is fimilar yet unknown. Sometimes I fight it, smoothing surfaces and reinforcing seams in pursuit of structural integrity. Other times I let it stay, because the crack is also information. A record of the conditions of making, the same way erosion is a record of weather and time. The finished sculptures carry both the deliberate gesture and the material’s resistance to it.
The resulting forms are small, legged, and slightly unstable. They read as anthropomorphic, geological, and occasionally extraterrestrial. Mountains with bodies, or bodies that have become mountains.
Occasionally revealing an interior while keeping the exterior ambiguous, that rhymes with things already present in the landscape: fault lines, crevices, the places where terrain opens up.
What the work is holding is landscape compressed into an intimate scale. The rocks carry the erosion and geological memory of the places where I find them, and by pressing clay to their surfaces I am translating the rocks into a new object. One small enough to hold but still reaching toward something much larger. The sublime is the ambition. The tabletop is the reality. That tension is not a failure of the work. It is the work.
Ceramics sits in an uncomfortable position in the art world, dismissed by some as craft because of its utility and accessibility, held to a different standard than other forms of sculpture despite requiring the same
rigor and physical intelligence. I do not spend much time arguing against that hierarchy. The work exists and it does what it does.
The recurring challenge is attachment. Clay of different dryness does not want to join, and the attempts to emulate a landscape that is fimilar yet unknown. Sometimes I fight it, smoothing surfaces and reinforcing seams in pursuit of structural integrity. Other times I let it stay, because the crack is also information. A record of the conditions of making, the same way erosion is a record of weather and time. The finished sculptures carry both the deliberate gesture and the material’s resistance to it.
The resulting forms are small, legged, and slightly unstable. They read as anthropomorphic, geological, and occasionally extraterrestrial. Mountains with bodies, or bodies that have become mountains.
Occasionally revealing an interior while keeping the exterior ambiguous, that rhymes with things already present in the landscape: fault lines, crevices, the places where terrain opens up.
What the work is holding is landscape compressed into an intimate scale. The rocks carry the erosion and geological memory of the places where I find them, and by pressing clay to their surfaces I am translating the rocks into a new object. One small enough to hold but still reaching toward something much larger. The sublime is the ambition. The tabletop is the reality. That tension is not a failure of the work. It is the work.
Ceramics sits in an uncomfortable position in the art world, dismissed by some as craft because of its utility and accessibility, held to a different standard than other forms of sculpture despite requiring the same
rigor and physical intelligence. I do not spend much time arguing against that hierarchy. The work exists and it does what it does.