Artist Statement

Objects made from clay slip from “art” to “decorative art” to “craft” to “hobby” across class, culture, time, and gender. Clay is establishment, outsider, or somewhere not-quite-either-but-both/and. It is made by the hand and sits at the table of workers and presidents and everyone in between. Its mutable nature has become a language through which I’ve been able to render myself legible to the larger art world as a person from a working-class community. 

As a former museum worker, I think of the past as a playground, not a script. Object interpretation, historical reproduction, and public history become tools to suggest a queer utopia of the past in which the present can see itself represented. 

Many of the techniques, materials, and motifs in my work are influenced by seventeenth and eighteenth century folk arts such as gravestones, sailor tattoos, scrimshaw, ceramic slipware, and sewing samplers. I’ve developed a lexicon of materials including slips, glazes and firing methods to create my work using the wheel.

I draw on the iconography of the old New England landscape of my childhood, the folk mythology of the Revolutionary War period, and rediscovering forgotten pottery techniques to create conceptual objects rooted in functional use. My practice is centered in making durable ceramics as a production potter as both a deliberate performance of the craft, and a way to make my work more accessible at scale. Art is for gallery walls and kitchens alike.