A collection of works in collaboration with printmaker Gretchen Jankowski.
I have been working on a series of urns over the last few years that express my emotions over compounded grief. The series displayed here is embedded with symbolism in an effort to give voice to my concept.
A Potter’s Field is a historic name used to describe a mass burial place for the unknown, poor, and those without families. I created a field of urns as a play on words to illustrate compounded grief.
In Elaine Scarry’s book The Body in Pain, she describes our human body experience as it relates to pain. She traces how our inability to communicate using written or spoken language is unavailable to us when we are in the throes of extreme pain. We can scream and moan, but our ability to describe accurately and communicate our experience of pain, is limited to a few non-descript words that do not capture our suffering in full. This language barrier eventually leads physicians to use symbols to help patients communicate and illustrate pain levels as in the Wong-Baker smiley face pain scale.
I created an alphabet as an elementary building of language to describe suffering.
The urns are thrown on the potter’s wheel out of black and brown clay bodies. There are 26 urns for each letter of the alphabet as a way to build a visual language about grief. They are decorated with a pattern of ribbons. The black and yellow ribbons are symbol of remembrance. To invert a symbol is to give it lesser meaning or imply the opposite. My meaning behind the use of the ribbons is to express my own struggle with grief; How can I remember, how can I forget.
A body of painterly pinched porcelain pottery with repeated radial lines and patterns. Inspired by the action of a droplet hitting the water and the ripple of the waves that move outward through the water.
A body of vessels in stoneware and wood about grief and remembrance.
Trophy forms in porcelain with painterly surface about homage and celebration 2016-17
Narrative works in porcelain from 2010-2016
A body of work in porcelain that explores print on clay, focusing on relief using Soft Kut linoleum.
Porcelain pots that incorporated narrative drawing and painterly glaze. 2005-14
Pots from 2000-05
