b. 1980 USA. Residing in St. Louis, MO, I work as an Instructional Technician of wood, metals and ceramics at the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, Washington University. A native of St. Louis, I recently returned after having spent the previous 14 years studying ceramics in the USA and China. Upon the completion of my MFA at Texas Tech University, I first moved to Jingdezhen, China, in 2008 to manage and oversee production of the Pottery Workshop (PWS) – Design Studio. After a year (2011-12) of teaching Ceramics at Missouri State University in Springfield, MO, I moved back to China to work at the PWS – Shanghai location. Here, I had the opportunity to instruct weekly studio classes, college courses, as well as to continue the development of my own creative work. During 2016 and 2017, I taught a semester at Northwest College, Powell, WY and spent the following academic year running the ceramics program at the University of West Florida in Pensacola. In 2017-18, my partner, Andrea Moon and I returned to Jingdezhen to Co-Direct the Pottery Workshop - International Residency and Education Center. Since returning to St. Louis, we continue to build our studio practice and immerse ourselves in the community.
artist statement
My creative practice is driven by my captivation of the union of craft, problem solving, ingenuity and creation. I have spent my career as a clay artist investigating all of these facets in both sculpture and tableware, and while both are approached with different formal contexts in mind, I find my conversation with each to be equally as important to my creative process. In fact, I believe that the two are symbiotic, and influencing of one another.
While ideas associated with oppositions and dichotomies has and continues to be a driving force in my work, I find that the subtleties and surprises of the creative process have the most influence. I have found that for me, thinking and the development of ideas are synonymous with the act of making.
Inspired by both the ideas and artifacts of collective memories and histories, I try to connect my romance of histories with process. Simply stated, I strive to take what is important to me and abstract, play and recreate my own formal artifacts and layers.
Considering glaze, surface, pattern and form as structure to create the greater whole, the same way I would consider sentence structure or writing, I am always thinking about how these components can be combined, layered and rearranged to create my narrative. Inspired by problem solving, I believe that searching for and investigating the challenge of innovation in my work is also part of my contemporary discourse.
