I have been making ceramics for over 20 years. It all started with a class I took as an undergraduate. Ceramics found me and took a permanent hold of my creative force. I learned wherever I could, in student clubs and community centers and eventually taught pottery classes along with working on my career as an Economist. While teaching at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, I enrolled in their arts program and studied Studio Arts with Concentration in Ceramics. Working in the studio there taught me much about being an artist and about myself. My passion for ceramics is more than artistic expression. Wherever I go, I find a ceramics studio to teach and work in so I can share my knowledge and love of ceramics.

Exhibitions

Clay and Glass Artists of California at the Palo Alto Art Center; Ceramic Sculpture, 2019, Palo Alto Art Center, Palo Alto, CA

CEAS 50th Anniversary Exhibit: Hand and Eye: Contemporary Reflections of East Asian Ceramic Traditions – Ceramic Sculpture, 2018, Stanford University EA Library, Stanford, CA

University of Tennessee Ceramics – Annual Student Show, 2007, Emporium, Knoxville, TN

Massachusetts Institute of Technology – Student Art Association Rotating Display, 2001-2003, MIT Museum, Cambridge, MA

Memberships

Association of Clay and Glass Artists of California (ACGA), Exhibiting Member, 2018 - present

ACGA, Associate Member 2010 - 2018

Highlights Sculptural Functional

"I have become a shadow of my work."

"You think art is things in clean galleries on white walls? Art is dirty, art is messy, art is hard work."

"Don't go ahh... desert [expands arms to the horizon], go eeh... desert [looks closely at the ground]."

"Oh, vineyard!
With wonderful, sweet grapes:
Hungry I came into you,
Hungry I depart."

I moved to Los Angeles with my parents when I was 15. An adopted daughter of California, I was impressed by the ability of this land to nurture, or to take life, to give profusely, or to devastate with the harshness of desert frugality and the draw of the luck. I sought to come to terms with the fine balance between one’s own life and giving up scarce resources to sustain another.

I record stories that this process tells, of the tradeoffs between growth and decay. I like to capture the moment of hope balanced against a more likely disappointment, to track lack and profusion, expansion and retreat, erosion, accumulation, dryness and flow. I am trained as an economist with an eye for the constrained optimization and the give and take of purpose and resource that ensues. I am drawn to the duality of scarcity and abundance that exists in the environments on the edge, where a dried, roughened or hardened exterior contains swelling fruit and seed, or burst of extravagant colored bloom throws all to hope in an otherwise reserved landscape. Such extreme surroundings bring to life for me the interconnectedness of these two outcomes of existence that I want to capture and re-tell. The suggestion of a husk, a seedling sprouting from a dying leaf, a fruit swelling in a dried shell narrate the possibilities.

I approach my work sculpturally. Round forms are wheel-thrown or made from slabs into closed forms which are then altered or cut and reassembled. Addition and removal create textures that become witness to the processes at play. The firing process is chosen to fit the piece: raku for a charred effect, cone 6 oxidation for an occasional bright color in in an otherwise muted palate. Most pieces are fired to cone 10 in reduction with the introduction of wood ash to the kiln at cone 9, or wood ash is placed directly on glazed ware to induce the interaction between flux in the glaze and ash. Smaller forms can be grouped or displayed inside larger vessels. Other forms are cracked, to be filled with gold epoxy as Kintsugi.