My work explores the visual languages and motifs that are transmitted from culture to culture. My interests in geology, archaeology, and history influence my work process. My work is constructed with traditional techniques, then incised, carved, and stained. The forms often relate to architectural and industrial sources. I use a variety of clays to refer directly to the Earth’s crust. I want the clay to show evidence of the manipulation of the material, and to reveal the natural processes that effect the material, thereby conveying a sense of history and continuity. I also believe that all art is, in some manner, self portrait.

I started to seriously study ceramics as an exchange student at art school in Norway, I was also studying weaving, and often found the motifs of weaving work their way onto my pots. After Norway, I went to the University of Minnesota to study with Warren Mackenzie. In Minneapolis, I learned so much about form and function and the traditions of making posts and historical forms. After I graduated I spent time as an archaeologist at a pre-pottery Neolithic site, Ain Ghazal, in Amman, Jordan. I was excited working in the square that we excavated in the hillside. It revealed the Earth’s history, as well as layers of human development, in the stratigraphy. Although the horizons of interest were pre-pottery, we had to excavate down through the layers of pot-shards, each one burnished with time and marked with geometric has marks. I was surrounded by ancient buildings and modern architecture that reprised and varied these geometric patterns which I had embraced through textiles. The cultural artifacts of the area had been influenced by all who had crossed through on the trade routes. It occurred to me that every culture goes through its own exploration of geometry and pattern. And the excavation itself, digging in the dirt, working through layers of history, became very personal. I felt that my concerns and ideas were more or less the same as the people of 7000 years ago who lived within the walls and worked on the iron oxide painted plaster floors, and who carefully placed their burials under the doorsill.