I have been drawing, arranging, and making things with my hands for as long as I can remember, and working with clay since 2009.
In 2013, ANK Ceramics was born— an evolving line of hand-thrown tableware, designed to be dynamic, timeless, and contemporary. It began with mugs and bowls and eventually expanded to include a full line of place settings, serving ware, and vases. Always curious about materials, I worked with many kinds of stoneware and mixed my own glazes, attempting to capture a harmony between the form and surface. The rigors of the production process are challenging, and its rhythms are engrossing.
A few years later, I began a new component of my practice— making larger and more complex vessels that were, by necessity, one of a kind. These pieces began on the wheel, with alterations and additions that allowed me to stretch away from roundness and symmetry. Eventually, I began to integrate coil- and slab-building and making pieces that are entirely divorced from the potter’s wheel. I fell in love with the peacefulness of hand-building— that it feels like a gentler, more reciprocal collaboration with the material.
In 2021, my studio life took another shift when an injury necessitated that I step away from the labor of tableware production and the pottery wheel. Nowadays, the ANK mugs and bowls are slip-cast, a process of pouring liquid clay into a plaster mold. They retain the slight variations of anything made by hand, and the glazes are still hand-mixed in small batches. It feels like an honor to make things that people use every day, that become a part of intimate moments and rituals, to make things that signify home.
I spend most of my time in the studio making one of a kind platters, bowls, vases, and sculptural vessels under my own name. I love the tactility of the material and the challenge of the process— the pace and physical possibilities and parameters of clay, glaze, and oxidation firing.
