In the spring of 2023, Stefani Threet approached me with the idea of creating a new body of work to show at Ceramic Concept. These new pieces are the result of that conversation. It pulls together pieces of many different ideas, processes and media I've worked with all the way back to college including painting, printmaking, mixed media collage and photography, and combines them in new ways with other techniques I had never tried before.  

One of the earliest things that shaped my current aesthetic was the outdoor message board at the university in China where I studied for a term in the early 90's. Messages were written in ink on rice paper, and glued on top of previous messages. As they were weathered by the sun, wind and rain, the ink bled and the paper peeled and became transparent in places, both exposing and hiding the layers underneath. The fragments of text lost their meaning as language, becoming pattern and shape. 

Many of the pots in this show are coated with terra sigillata; a clay slip made by letting clay settle in water, then siphoning off only the finest particles that float in the middle of the mix. This creates a thin white slip with a soft sheen that covers over my dark clay, while still allowing the surface of the clay, and some its color, to show through. I created divisions on the pots like windows that reveal some pieces of what's beneath the surface and obscure others. I filled them with silk-screened and painted underglaze, and with decal images of patterns and textures.

As I worked on these new pieces, exploring new territory and digging back through my past creative successes and failures, it felt a little like archeology, and it seemed only right to also include the dinosaur imagery I currently work with. Many of the other images come from an image bank I've created over the years of pictures I take of textures I find interesting. Many include snippets of deteriorated text that remind me of those Chinese message boards.