Artist Statement

When I was a girl, I thought I could do anything. My making is an act of moving back to that bold creature who lived so fully in sync with nature and with my own creativity. I was a girl who fell in love with one tree after the other, seeing them all as imaginary friends. I played in the woods, making magic potions of bright, hard berries and sticky burrs, concoctions that could empower and transform. I saw every mysterious path as a secret portal and I stood my ground in that dreamy world -- a person who owned my own intensity. It’s a powerful thing to live as your most confident self, connected to the trees you loved as an eight-year-old. I wish everyone would try it, or at least think about it.

​

In my ceramics practice, I am obsessed with the strange seamlessness between human beings and the natural world. I think about the idea that trees communicate with each other, cooperating and protecting each other like a human community. Scientists tell us the connections come through fungi mycelium, deep underground and hidden from our eyes. But I see it all over the place – the weird relationships, the mimicry, the crazy metaphors. I have a compulsive need to get at the excessiveness in nature. I am thrilled by the juxtaposition of traditional beauty with the spikey, the threatening with the alluring, the toxic with the nectar. Is it abundance or contamination? Decay or rebirth? I am fearless and curious about it all.

​

I make lush, abundant ceramic objects that lurk somewhere between botany, creature, humans. I see these forms placed in domestic spaces, an inherently female presence, quietly strong and fruitful, moving from one thing to another. My work is a botanical illustration in ceramics of this world of my obsessions. It’s a three-dimensional archive of my imagination gone wild and deep into the woods or the desert, into the stamin of a flower or the heart of a girl. It’s my own world, a pretend ecosystem, a Garden of Farris where I get to make the rules and reclaim who I am in the world. I am in love with Nature, and I am in love with making – its own rules and excessiveness, full of the unexpected, the impossible, the transformations, the joy.