"Foreign Soil" Gallery

Artist Statement:
I came to the Golden Bridge Pottery with a few ideas in mind. One of which was to investigate how Indian ceramic materials would respond to the firing techniques that I have learned back at home in America. In addition to making, I’ve spent the last 4 months testing these materials as glazes, slips, and clay bodies, and fired Golden Bridge’s anagama kiln three times, with a wide range of results. Foreign Soil is a documentation of these efforts. I am a foreigner to this place working with materials that are familiar, yet foreign to me. Woodfiring has a long history of place-based aesthetics, and I hope that this work might have something to say about the place where it was created.

I have carried formal decisions with me from home and implemented them here with the new materials. Bulbous cups and proud pitchers, bowls with generous lips that want to be used. I subdued my tendency to decorate the forms as it was my intention to let the inherent colors and textures of the materials speak for themselves. The little decoration that I did allow is influenced by the foliage and architecture of my workspace at the Golden Bridge Pottery.

The two wall-pieces are manifestations of ideas that came to me years ago while immersing myself in altered states of consciousness, and the writings of Alan Watts and Ram Dass. At first glance, the processes of this world may seem chaotic. Us humans have a tendency to try to explain and define everything to the tee in order to make ourselves feel more secure inside, and when we can’t explain something, we can get panicked and uncomfortable. This work is about noticing how ostensible the chaos is, appreciating the perfection and order that lay beneath, and accepting the notion that there are things in this world that we as mere humans just do not have the facilities to define or fully comprehend.