I have always loved learning new things, for as long as I can remember.  This naturally emerges in my life as an artist, as I am still exploring new mediums, and can’t imagine ever tiring of doing so.  My recent artistic explorations have brought me into contact with watercolors, screen printing, and oil painting for the first time, and have strengthened my existing knowledge and love of bookbinding, ceramics, and photography.  I hope to continue discovering new materials, processes and techniques that make my heart sing, and that I can share with my students.  

I have found over the last few years that I am particularly drawn to wheel-throwing.  More recently, I have also experimented with different clays, forms, and mishima techniques extensively in the last nine months.  The movement of clay, its inherently tactile nature, and its direct connection with the earth have captured my heart and my imagination.  I find ceramics to be an excellent medium through which to communicate my love of nature and to reflect on the environments that have impacted me, particularly in the last year.  I spent the fall semester of 2018 studying abroad in Ireland, and the landscapes I encountered spoke to my soul and held my attention long after I left each one.  After returning to America, I spent a few months searching for ways to do these places justice.  I discovered that mishima drawings - painting wax over the surface of a clay object, carving into it, and filling the lines with underglaze - on wide, easy-to-hold bowls captured my experience with the places, people and mentality of Ireland.  I found that they were also able to communicate the beauty of the vistas that I had been enthralled by since visiting them.  Wanting to continue exploring mishima techniques, I spent a full summer I completing a ceramics fellowship focused on digging my own clay from my property, and played with new materials and subject matter.  This culminated in a new series of porcelain-slip mishima drawings on vessels of my wild clay, this time featuring the flora and fauna that share the land I call "home".

I have found ceramics and bookbinding to be especially fulfilling as artistic practices and creative outlets.  My art practice helps me to process the experiences that I’ve had, prompted by the places I pass through, the spaces that I exist in, and the connections I make with the people that move into and out of my life.  I am deeply sentimental, and my artwork, as an extension of myself, has an equally sentimental tone.  

Beyond personal processing, I aim to create art that brings joy and beauty into my life, and the lives of others.  I am keenly aware of the pain and atrocities plaguing our world, and have experienced enough of it myself to know how pervasive it can be in our daily lives.  My hope, though, is that I can communicate through my art that there is light and hope and beauty to be found, even in the darkest of times.  And often, I create artwork that I hope will bring a little bit more joy into the lives of the people that interact with it.  I frequently create art with the intention of giving it away to the people I care about.  

As an art educator, I am constantly accumulating new ideas to share with students, and consistently changing my own perception of the world, of children, and of art through the professional and personal learning I am engaged in.  

And through each of these individual elements, I am continuing to learn what it means to be human in the present moment, what it means to be passionate and driven, yet empathetic and conscious of the lives of others, and how we affect each other and the precious world we inhabit.  

And as long as I am learning, I am fulfilled.

— Indigo, 2.22.22