About
My artwork is an exploration of visual language—how the images, symbols, and messages that surround us shape the way we experience everyday life. I use clay to examine the saturation of culture we encounter every day: product packaging, advertisements, headlines, logos, instructions, and countless other forms of graphic communication that compete for our attention. Although these images are often created to be temporary, they influence our memories, desires, and understanding of the world around us.
Years spent working in advertising, illustration, and painting trained me to look closely at how images communicate. They taught me about composition, color, visual hierarchy, and the ability of an image to attract attention and create meaning. When I returned to ceramics in 2000, I came back to the medium with a different perspective. Clay became a way to combine my understanding of visual communication with the physical and enduring qualities of sculpture.
Using an extensive collection of stencils and printing plates, I create layers of imagery and text over the clay surface. Fragments of commercial graphics, advertising headlines, product labels, and familiar symbols become embedded into the surfaces of my ceramic forms. These images are removed from their original purpose and placed into a new context, where they can be reconsidered and given a second life.
I am drawn to the contrast between the temporary nature of mass communication and the permanence of fired clay. A news headline that existed for a day, an advertisement designed to be replaced, or a package intended to be discarded can become a lasting record of the culture that produced it.
My work does not attempt to deliver a single message. Instead, I create objects where unexpected relationships can emerge. A logo beside a headline, a product reference combined with an unfamiliar form, or an ordinary image placed in a new setting invites viewers to slow down and look again.
After many years working with images and objects, I remain interested in one central question: What do the visual messages we surround ourselves with reveal about who we are?
For me, ceramics is a means of collecting and preserving the visual traces of contemporary life. By embedding fragments of our shared visual culture into clay, I transform images designed to be consumed and forgotten into enduring objects that invite reflection on the messages, memories, and meanings we carry with us.