My work draws from the visual and emotional vocabulary of American stoneware vessels that surrounded me throughout my childhood. My grandmother and father collected these forms, filling our home with a sense of permanence at a time when our family felt fractured. Antiquing trips and the quiet presence of these objects became acts of care and consistency. As I return to these forms in my practice, the vessels become containers for memory, family narrative, and the search for belonging. By reinterpreting these artifacts, I explore how personal history shapes identity, the ability for domestic objects to carry emotional weight, and how the process of making can become a way of understanding and preserving what one endures.

Constructed by hand-woven coils, my work is gently pinched together creating a finish that mirrors the subtle blemishes, marks, and scars that life departs on us. Leaving the surface raw and unrefined allows space for understanding the journey as much as the final destination. I fire the work atmospherically, in either a soda or wood kiln, allowing the flame and atmosphere to mark the clay in unpredictable ways. That lack of control feels essential, as the kiln– like life– decides its own outcome. The resulting surfaces carry stories of touch, time, and transformation. They are imperfect records of care, pressure, and endurance.

As my practice evolves, I’ve begun to layer these vessels with motifs and iconography from my childhood—visual fragments that echo the rural landscapes of my upbringing and the environments I continue to move through. These images act as touchstones, reminders of where I come from and how those early environments continue to shape my sense of self. Through this work, I am exploring how family narratives and the stories we inherit inform the people we become, and how the vessels we build, both literal and emotional, hold the traces of our origins and the ongoing work of becoming.