“My medium is clay. I have been told that my style is very rustic and manly. I do a lot of slip casting. A lot of it is construction materials: vents, hammers, wrenches, nuts. So I think that’s where the manly part comes from.
I’d probably say that a formative experience for me was when I lived in Denver, I worked for a studio potter and he had been a potter for going on 55 years. He always had a studio tech, he called it an apprentice. I work with him for 10 years; the entire time I was in Denver. I would say that was the most formative thing, just getting to be a studio tech and doing everything that he didn’t want to do, which towards the end was a lot of things. I felt like I somewhat ran his studio practice, to a degree. But also where we worked was the art district of Denver. It was this huge old building and he had turned it into an artist studio. There were 27 different artists renting space in the building. It was 3 stories. It was just huge. There was a gallery up front. It was really cool to work with and for him, but then to also have that many different artists of all different mediums around all the time. It was like this big communal art thing. I would say that was the most formative for me as an artist.
Starting while I was at Goshen College, doing the student sale at the end of every semester, I was always just amazed that I could make what I thought at the time was pretty crappy art, and people still showed up and buy it. I remember that being surprising to me.
But now coming back to the area after being gone for a while, I think Goshen has a super unique art education background where people just know and understand the arts and appreciate them. I haven’t had tons of experience in Goshen, but I’m really excited to keep getting more involved here because clearly there’s a whole lot of art going on.”
