ABOUT

I am covetous by nature. As a teenager I covered the halls of the Met and MoMA, sketching all that I longed to touch–my eyes a proxy for my fingers. Museums were my chosen houses of worship and their masterpieces my sacred icons. Imagine my shock when a group of grade-schoolers tramped by Maillol’s bronze figure “Night,” and a chatty girl in pigtails contoured the sculpture with one fluid, absentminded gesture of her hand as if it were a stairwell banister. Not the slightest sense of impropriety or shame. The very idea.

That light touch stayed with me, inspiring a spate of youthful misdemeanors. I dared myself to touch the untouchable, culminating in the application of my lips to the sandaled sole of Apollo in Bernini’s Daphne and Apollo. I often think about our very human desire to touch eternity. The warped mosaic floor of Edward the Confessor’s chapel in Westminster Abbey, emancipated of so many tiles by devotees. The supplication to a relic. The looting of tombs. To possess something–history, power, beauty–simply by holding it.

This fundamental aspect of our physicality is why I shifted focus from drawing and painting to clay while in college. Since then, I’ve explored all types of clay, firing processes and techniques. What threads my work together is an interest in the limits of clay’s plasticity and the tension between ceramic’s profoundly archival qualities and its utter fragility. What we can hold in our hands and what is beyond our grasp. What survives the ravages of time and our brutality, and what is obliterated.