Artists

My work is rooted in historical ceramic vessel traditions, informed by contemporary art and design and inspired by botanical and natural forms. For the past fifteen years the vessel forms in my ceramic work have slowly been evolving into sculptural, hybrid organic, biomorphic forms. After buying a house and creating a garden in the mid 90’s I began to collect plants. Over time this became an obsession for me and I started bringing plants into my studio and looking more closely at them, examining and dissecting them. I began studying historical botanical drawings, close up photography of plants, and cross section scientific renderings of plant and animal life forms. I have always been drawn to ornament, embellishment, color, pattern, and texture and recently have become more involved with the details, the close ups, the abstract, the peering into. My interest in detail, layers and encrustations has been heightened by repeated travels to India and China with visits to elaborately carved, pierced and painted temples, ruins, and architecture. I am fascinated by the complexity, diversity, beauty and danger of the natural world and this leads to thoughts about growth, nourishment, attraction, and survival. After many years of closely observing and collecting plants and constructing vessel forms that transformed into plant forms, I began inventing my own hybrid flower/animal species using botanical nomenclature as my departure point. This is the basis of my latest work, the Gouthroii series.

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