My first experience with ceramics was in my elementary school art room. We had clay. We had water. We had a potters wheel. I was 10 years old. It did not go well. I remember it like it was yesterday. I somehow managed to carry this tragic defeat into adulthood, where decades later I would yet again sit at a potters wheel determined it would not defeat me again.
It didn’t. And the creation of that first lumpy ashtray ignited in me an obsession with mastering clay and pushing the limits of a virtually limitless material. If you can dream it, it can be done with clay. And no dream is too big. It’s what drives me to this day. Every time I sit down at the potters wheel my goal is to nudge the work a little closer to the edge of my limits. It is a practice.
I was raised in Minneapolis. My mother did not drive, so many weekends were spent taking the bus downtown, walking city streets amongst the tall buildings, shopping the department stores, admiring the store windows and having lunch at the Woolworth’s lunch counter. It’s how I became an urbanite at heart, and it’s what continues to inform my design aesthetic and the evolution of my work.
In my work I attempt to capture the splendor and chaos of urban life. Architecture. Modern Art. Design. Theater. Music. Street signs. A doorway sprayed with graffiti. A mail box. An abandoned shopping cart. A fire hydrant painted bright red. Some elements of beauty and some elements not considered classically beautiful, all joined together to create a tapestry of life.
