my first blog!

Welcome to my blog. I am very excited to share with you my recent ceramic projects.

I picked up pottery 5 years ago while taking a class at Weddington Activity Center, NC. My instructors saw a natural talent in me and I was an eager student. I began throwing on a wheel and fell in love with clay. In spring 2007 I took a ceramics class at UNCC, where I was exposed to more natural colors and the clay was rough, earthy, a stark contrast to the white clay I was used to working with.

When I first started, my glazing technique was inspires by my graphic design, layout of my architecture school portfolio. I just fell in love with those colors, white, black and red. White at UNCC I used any and all glazes that we had available, and experimenting with spray booth. It was also quite exciting to use the gas kiln.

As architecture school became more time consuming, I had to put my passion for clay on hold.
In spring of 2009 I was fortunate to pick up ceramics again. My wonderful parents have a studio next to their house where I go to create my pieces these days. Surrounded by nature the studio is a perfect artist's retreat.

My work of the last several months is made up of pieces that are specifically not thrown on the wheel. I am constructing my projects from slabs of clay, made of cut up and torn up pieces. Numerous molds that my mother has in her studio serve as shapes for my projects. It's wonderful to work with thin pieces of clay, they are almost like paper folding, and overlapping.

I am still obsessed with the black, white, and red colors. However in this recent work, the textures, and marks are different from my previous work. They are scars and stitches that connect tens of pieces that make up a single piece of work.

Here are several images of my latest work. I will be adding more images on weekly basis, most of recent work, and some of projects from previous years (reflecting on ideas I would like to explore again soon). Enjoy!