The long version of my bio –

In writing my website bio, I’ve thought a lot about how best to describe myself as an artist. I think the most important thing I can include is an explanation of how I wound up making things the way I make them now. From my earliest memories on, it was always my goal to depict the world around me as faithfully as possible; but as I entered my twenties and encountered new feelings that I could neither escape nor express, that began to change rapidly. In my senior year of college, I was diagnosed as bipolar. A diagnosis like that is a mixed blessing. On one hand, it’s a relief to know that the way you feel is not normal and life actually doesn’t have to be constant agony. But on the other hand, it’s lonely to know that the way you feel is not normal, and that the particular agony you’ve become so familiar with is not widely relatable. There is a lot of reckoning to be done as you wade out of those depths.

I think the alienation I experienced at that time – from myself and from everything familiar to me – unlocked an ongoing interest in identity,  emotion, memory, and the divides between our interior and exterior lives, and between ourselves and others. If I tried to express exactly how I felt in concrete terms, I know it wouldn’t land; but I think when things are a bit abstracted, it opens up the door for someone else to see shadows of their own experience in what I’m presenting to them. It’s like we’re all working on separate puzzles with our own pictures, but some of the pieces are shaped the same.  So that’s why all my conceptual art is abstract at this point. And as for ceramics and the focus on functional items, I think it comes from the same experiences. Ceramics feel like one of the most vital and living artforms. The focus on functional pieces comes from a bleeding appreciation I have for the fact that I’ve come so far and am in a place where I feel fully involved in my own life and the world around me. It strikes a special chord to know that a piece I make will be absorbed into someone else’s life. They participate in the world just like I do – and it’s all a celebration of how much that means to me.