Artist Statement

I didn't go into college intending to study ceramics. My first class on the subject was a suggestion from my advisor because a pre-architecture student, as I was at the time, should have a demonstrable command of three-dimensional space. After that first class, I needed more of the process, which I had come to know as a means of producing works of permanence and function. The appeal of permanence is partially - perhaps cynically - a preoccupation with notions of legacy; ceramics is a uniquely enduring medium, able to last literal millennia, and that turned out to be a formative influence on what I value in art. More nobly, permanence is an aspirational quality of functional work, which is to say, durability makes for more usable stuff.

Durability is fundamental to ceramics (I often joke that I earned a degree in making rocks) and informs everything else about ceramic work without requiring any specialized tools, techniques, or equipment, which I think instilled in me certain expectations - unrealistically so, maybe - for later work. I don't generally go in for fragility; the separate media I've come to work with all have some connotations of resilience. Ceramics consists ultimately of stone and glass; leather and wood are reputably hardy in many applications; bookbinding may seem the odd one out but only in ways that are necessary: we write on paper which, practically, can only be so strong, so the durability has to be bestowed by the other materials and by the methods of construction. In relation to reasonable use, books can be tremendously resilient (I explored some traditions of particularly hardy construction in my silver springback book). When I do choose to work with visual delicacy or elegance - things that may look fragile, e.g., inlays in some of my recent bindings - I expect myself to find ways to make them as physically sound as the rest of the piece, lest they inhibit functionality, which I would consider a failing.

Eventually I came into some confidence in terms of knowing what makes for good functional work and how to produce it, but I remained an artist working in the functional realm, which, conceptually speaking, is an absolute hornet's nest. I couldn't bring myself to fully disagree with the idea that art is defined by uselessness, which raised some obvious concerns. Ironically, I will now defend that thesis, but I don't think it's been presented fairly; "art" isn't so much about uselessness per se as it is about unnecessariness. Art is something that is begotten of creative decisions which are begotten of individuals in unique circumstances; art is therefore - necessarily - an artifact of humanity, and specifically, of a person who exerted their will to influence the world around them, even in the smallest of ways. Art, further, needs to be observed: if it falls in the forest, I don't believe it makes a sound, and whatever Schrödinger put in his box isn't art, at least until he told people about it. I may exert my will on the world but if it doesn't interact with the rest of the world somehow, it adds up to no meaningful effect - it may as well not exist at all - and is, therefore, not art.

At this point I could go any number of weird ways: can I even make art that doesn't interact with the world, since I am part of the world and I would be doing the making? It would be easy to get speculatively pseudo-scientific, invoking butterfly effects and quantum entanglement and other things I would have to pretend to understand, and risk playing into a pretentious stereotype of faux-intellectualism; the idea of exerting individual will to substantially affect the world, and the subjective value thereby created ostensibly from nothing, is basically Crowleyan magical thinking, the in-depth discussion of which is best suited to alienating houseguests. All this is to say: I've turned myself around like a Spirograph trying to understand where I belong in the art world, whether I belong there at all, and what contributions I can make; I've made innumerable connections along the way, explored and abandoned more paths than I could count, developed values and ideals both pursuant to and independent of my art, and frankly, have no concrete answers to show for it.

This isn't a swansong for my artistic endeavors, though. I'll forego the magical context if only to retain readership, but I now tend towards the idea that the answer to "what is art" is not, as it were, the answer. Influencing the world in any small way is an end unto itself - not for power, wealth, or any of those monkey's paw sort of motives - but because humanity does not exist without art and vice versa. We're all making decisions all the time that aren't particularly important in many ways, but are fingerprints of our existence; I consider myself an artist because of the reverence I have for these artifacts of ourselves and the joy I take in starting projects simply for the opportunities for "unnecessary" decisions along the way, which in my experience benefits from the framework provided by making things that must serve a function.

I choose to be a functional artist because it places my audience so close to the work. Paintings can be viewed - and can be enormously impactful - in a museum or in a bedroom, and sculptures may enrich a park or a gallery, but my bracelets can be worn; my books can be carried, and eventually filled with even more art; an instrument made by my hand can be played in solitude, with all the wonder that can bring, or shared with an audience, benefiting further from that collective intimacy. Functional art is not better than other forms, but it speaks to me in ways they do not, and I feel best suited to it.

Visually, I tend towards simplicity. As far as academic influences go, I'm drawn to extreme abstraction a la Rothko (a divisive choice of example, I'm sure); De Stijl, especially Mondrian; Frank Lloyd Wright (who occasionally used visual complexity, such as in his stained glass, but not in ways that inhibit function); and Shoji Hamada, whose work was relentlessly functional. What these methodologies and influences have in common for me is their emphasis on construction more than symbolism. This is partially because I never want surface decoration to supersede functionality, but that never felt to me like the complete answer. I love ornate work - particularly in architecture - but it doesn't come naturally to me. I always got bogged down and frustrated whenever I tried to make my work busier. I explore this in some depth in the article on my mid-century inlaid notebook; that piece was when I fully understood my tendency to emphasize textures and relationships between simple forms. When, for example, I was deciding what to do with the inlay on that book, I stopped myself at a simple, vertically-centered rectangle, because I subconsciously knew that significant form didn't require anything further. I find great satisfaction in such a streamlined art object: it is easy to engage with but remains artistically intriguing just as long as anything more fancily wrought might. Even better, as functional work, the audience - which is to say, the user - has ample time to know the object and to develop an understanding of it. A relationship is easier to cultivate with an object that gives so little away, and rewards someone who takes the time to look for it.

The apparent simplicity lets the object insinuate itself more universally, and this idea of embedding something quietly intriguing and enriching into a person's life, something useful, something that is, in a way, an anonymously ingrained part of me, feels like a legacy worth pursuing.