Board of Directors, Association of Clay & Glass Artists of California (2018-present)

Member, Orchard Valley Ceramic Arts Guild

Teaching Volunteer, Advanced Ceramics, Gunn High School, Palo Alto, CA (2015-2022)

Artist’s Statement: My college and graduate work focused on wildlife ecology, particularly on birds, but art and craft have always been part of my life. I started working with clay seriously after moving to California in 2014. Before that I lived in North Carolina, where we raised our sons and kept dairy goats.  I’ve always kept my hands busy – with carpentry, quilting, gardening, cheesemaking – but clay has taken over in recent years.  Teachers in Spain, North Carolina, and California have made the journey much more productive and enjoyable.  I like thin-walled, finely-trimmed functional pottery, but I also make tiles and larger pieces with more sculptural qualities. Whenever possible, I use clays and glaze materials that I gather locally. My work is fired in electric and wood-burning kilns.

During the pandemic I started making hand-built books as I pondered how we connect with the world outside of normal social exchanges.  For me, books have always been both an escape and a way to hear other people’s thoughts and voices, particularly voices from the past.  Firing ceramic books becomes a metaphor for how powerful and resilient those words and voices can be.  Likewise, I spend a lot of time outdoors studying the natural world, particularly birds.  Influenced by my gig leading bird surveys at a local preserve, I find making birds in clay to be a kind of reassurance. I like the layers of resilience that exist in the finished work: there is the resilience of Nature itself, there is the resilience of clay when it’s been fired, and lastly, there are the seemingly ancient surfaces from the wood-firing that conjure wisdom of the deep past. 

I've studied many older pottery traditions, which has led to experiments with burnished and blackened pottery, terra sigillata, sgraffito, barrel-firing in saggars, and glazes made from local rocks and plant ash.  I've also started using found clays; that is, clays dug from the ground.  They aren't always useful as clay bodies, but they can be beautiful slips or glaze ingredients.  I like the whole process of digging, refining, and brushing on these clays, each with its own distinct color and response to firing. 

There is great satisfaction in holding a finished piece of pottery that is useful and pleasing, but what I like best about working with clay is the link it forms between the ground, my hands, and the artistic impulse that led me to the wheel in the first place. 

photo by Nancy Kalow