Artist Statement

My studio interests primarily include ceramics and drawing. My clay work is inspired in equal part by archetypal vessel forms and the varied intersections of line and form. Informing these intersections and my working habits are my interests in letterform, graffiti art, and jazz. Guided by improvisation, my work relies on wheel-thrown and hand-built forms, most commonly presented as abstractions of cups, bottles, and vases. My current bodies of work are following a theme I call rigmarole involving vessels in several incarnations that play with graphic cloud images, graffiti and that hint at my multi ethnic identity.

A student and artist of ceramics for nearly 30 years, I have intimate connection and sensitivity to the tactile process of making art objects. Much of my working mode involves loosely harnessing the plastic potential of clay and its anachronistic capacity to encode moments of touch and circumstance. Like an open sketchbook, the confluence of forms and images compressing into or extending out from my work are a collage of ideas some filtered from varying ceramic traditions, theoretical concepts of abstraction, the art of drawing, and still others from the velocity of poplar culture and societal encounters.

My studio habits up to now have consisted mainly of traditional ceramic hand building methods and the pottery wheel. Yet in these constructions methods, I have gravitated toward collage and distortion as the means to my ends. Recently though 3D modeling and rapid prototyping (RP) have found their way into my studio habits. I have found these methods uniquely capable of merging my varied influences. As soon as I became aware of this new technology, I perceived a natural bridge between clay modeling and virtual rendering, conceptualizing and manipulating real material in form and in space. This technology presents an opportunity to render in a virtual environment certain intuitions uniquely knowable to a craftsman. It is this territory that my rigmarole is currently probing.