Photo by Robin Dreyer
About Me
I am a potter living in Helena, Montana, with my wife and our three (3!) cats. I am currently a resident artist at Studio 740. I was born and raised in Helena, and this place has thoroughly shaped me and my work. Much of the ideas behind my work are influenced by the landscapes of Montana and from growing up in a community that has long supported artist-potters. I grew up living with and using handmade pots, which shaped my ideas of how pots can add to one’s home and life.
I studied psychology in school and began pursuing ceramics more intensely after graduating. I’ve come to understand my interest in both disciplines is rooted in an interest in understanding and working with people. Ceramics (and pots in particular) is an incredibly multi-modal medium, encompassing history, sociology, anthropology, physics, chemistry. The potential to interact with all of these different ideas keeps me excited to work with clay.
My formative education in ceramics came gradually through years of working at craft schools, community studios, and for other artists, and then suddenly through going to graduate school. I completed artist residencies at Red Lodge Clay Center and Pottery Northwest, and I received my MFA degree in Ceramic Art from the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University in 2023. I enjoy educating and mentoring others alongside making my own work.
About the Work
I make pots, and I enjoy asking nuanced questions of form as well as big-picture questions of what pots do in our world. In what ways do handmade pots contribute to modern life? How do I, as a contemporary potter, meld traditional skills and processes with innovations in tools and materials? My work is rooted in North American studio pottery, and I am interested in creating a dialogue with my lineage through the work.
I think about cups, bowls, and plates as “tools,” and jars, pitchers, and teapots as “containers,” though these categories are mutable. Pots can acquire their own kind of agency through the social relationships they participate in. The vessel, through the concept of containment, delineates an interior and exterior space and connects the two. Vessels are metaphors for our bodies, which bridge our interior psychological space from the exterior world that we inhabit.
The land and sky around me inform much of my personal sense of place, and they also drive the surfaces of my work, my material research and my sense of touch. Tactility is paramount for me – feeling is transmitted and embodied in pots through touch. I seek to elicit certain feelings in the work through the use of luscious, satiny glazes or rough, unglazed, woodfired surfaces. The speed and scale of my touch on the clay is also vitally important, whether that is through pinching or lines from the wheel. Familiarity and patterns develop through the repetition of touch, which draws me to make work in series. There is a rhythm to working in repetition that creates an infinite amount of potential expression.
