Artist Statement
As a Socially-Engaged Craft artist, I use the ceramic vessel to explore our ecological relationship with plants as food through growing, cooking, eating, and sharing meals. Using craft as a premise, my work draws on a critical understanding of human relationships and the merger between art and life. I design civic projects that focus on the meal, personal food choices, food as a form of communication, and the ceramic vessel as a transmitter and artifact. Using an object-based process in the ceramic arts, and a community-based, socially-engaged art practice I make functional objects intended for use in everyday life and orchestrate the parameters surrounding their use by engaging participants. This human involvement is what distinguishes my work from traditional pottery and brings it into the sphere of Socially-Engaged Craft.
My studio work is a consideration of form, function, pattern, and color of the ceramic vessel. My work exists as physical objects as well as social projects in which the vessel serves as a catalyst in creating a food dialogue. I am attempting to turn viewers into active participants by inviting them to become users, and thus extending the value of the individual object outward toward the community. The individualized design of these handmade objects, even within sets, is a way to focus people on a specific experience and to create mindfulness in eating. There is value added in both the aesthetic of handmade dishes, the experience of eating in this format, and the benefits visually, socially, and nutritionally of making certain choices. Through use, the vessel has the ability to elevate the food we consume and asks the viewers to reconsider what they eat, who they eat with, what they eat from, and how food affects our bodies. After use the vessel remains imprinted in our memory as a carrier of stories. Even after use, the vessel remains as an artifact and carrier of memory and story.
As a Socially-Engaged Craft artist, I use the ceramic vessel to explore our ecological relationship with plants as food through growing, cooking, eating, and sharing meals. Using craft as a premise, my work draws on a critical understanding of human relationships and the merger between art and life. I design civic projects that focus on the meal, personal food choices, food as a form of communication, and the ceramic vessel as a transmitter and artifact. Using an object-based process in the ceramic arts, and a community-based, socially-engaged art practice I make functional objects intended for use in everyday life and orchestrate the parameters surrounding their use by engaging participants. This human involvement is what distinguishes my work from traditional pottery and brings it into the sphere of Socially-Engaged Craft.
My studio work is a consideration of form, function, pattern, and color of the ceramic vessel. My work exists as physical objects as well as social projects in which the vessel serves as a catalyst in creating a food dialogue. I am attempting to turn viewers into active participants by inviting them to become users, and thus extending the value of the individual object outward toward the community. The individualized design of these handmade objects, even within sets, is a way to focus people on a specific experience and to create mindfulness in eating. There is value added in both the aesthetic of handmade dishes, the experience of eating in this format, and the benefits visually, socially, and nutritionally of making certain choices. Through use, the vessel has the ability to elevate the food we consume and asks the viewers to reconsider what they eat, who they eat with, what they eat from, and how food affects our bodies. After use the vessel remains imprinted in our memory as a carrier of stories. Even after use, the vessel remains as an artifact and carrier of memory and story.
