Artist Statement

I believe strong, effective art has the power to mobilize communities for great social change. I started making pots because I wanted to create—with my own hands—the artifacts of a world in which myself, the people I care about, and other marginalized, societally devalued people will always matter. I am concerned with questions of beauty, value, equity, and access. A sphere is perhaps the most important form in my work. I consider a sphere the basic building block for many of my other functional and sculptural forms. I activate different ways to distort spheres to create distinctively new shapes for cups, bottles, bowls, and even plates. A sphere is perfect, symmetrical across every axis, infinite, demanding, and complete. Perfect spheres are rigid and strict in their dimensions, yet soft and inviting in their appearance. Being influenced by spheres, the contours of my pots are round, continuous, and particular. Growing up, many aspects of my life felt uncertain, insecure, insubstantial, and readily subject to change. By utilizing meticulous, round forms, I attempt to exert control over a highly variable medium, forcing a sense of closure and completeness in my work that eases the tension of not having this control in other aspects of life. I also employ bright color lines in my work, which has a positive psychological effect by inspiring a sense of joy and fulfillment that relates to larger issues of empathy that I explore in my practice. In endeavoring to make conscious the act of being empathetic, I am contributing to an overdue societal resurgence of investment in mental health and stability.

Through abstraction, my work explores issues of social justice, mental health, equity, and access. Clay as a material and abstraction as a visual vocabulary both afford the ability to reconstruct reality. To mold clay is to exert one’s own will onto the physical earth around them, and through glazing and firing make real and permanent the object of one’s imagination. Using non-representational lines and shapes to make meaning invites the possibility of a single stroke to invoke an infinite number of historical, contemporary, societal or personal narratives in service of building a complex tapestry of conceptual actualizations that continues to reveal themselves to the viewer and the maker over time.

My work serves as an autoethnographic embodiment of Black and Queer resistance/joy. It engages the narratives of my family and communities that I hold membership to, tracks a history of my experiences, and provides insights into as well as explanations of the material realities of me and my people. My various bodies of work are best summarized into three porous categories that began to coalesce in the wake of an isolating COVID-19 shut down: materiality, form and design, and taking up space. I make wheel-thrown, hand-built, and slip-casted ceramic objects whose curvy contours, minimal surfaces, and graphic geometric patterns pay homage to the intergenerational lived experiences of marginalized peoples. In doing so, I proclaim the inherent worth in these experiences.