Current Exhibitions
My work is still on view at the Western North Carolina Sculpture Center in Lenoir, NC, as part of the inaugural exhibition opening their new indoor sculpture space.
My collection of pieces in this group show speaks to transition moments. Walking into something for the first time, not knowing what's new, what's stable, what's old, what needs to be left behind, or what needs to be held onto can shape how the new is perceived with a hyper-awareness and constant vigilance of it all.
The titles reference lines from poetry and fables that capture the weird magic of sometimes ungainly first steps into new beginnings:
"a distant bell that causes boys to run and laugh and girls to stand and tremble" - James Thurber, The White Deer, 1945 (pictured here)
"stamping with his foot, making offers with his head, and bellowing so terribly that the whole herd quaked for fear of him" - Samuel Croxall's Aesop's Fables, 1722
"the wind of my fear lest he depart jerked him to his jointy knees" - Edna St. Vincent Millay, The Fawn, 1956
"what sent him crashing off, leaping and stumbling on his new leg" - Edna St. Vincent Millay, The Fawn, 1956
The exhibition runs through February.
Studio Focus
Kitchen Installation
I'm deep into experiments for a residential kitchen installation, exploring wall hangings and groupings of similarly shaped objects in multiples. The nested bowl sets range from matte speckled surfaces to deep glossy blues and blacks, each iteration testing how glaze behavior changes with form repetition. The cubic wall pieces play with negative space and depth—small glazed recesses set into raw clay bodies that create a modular system of potential arrangements. Each piece is a variable in a larger equation: how do multiples create rhythm? How does glaze unite or differentiate forms? What happens when functional objects become architectural?
Glaze Investigations
I'm currently running systematic tests to evaluate kaolin substitutions for my community studio, comparing materials from different mines to find the right fit to our claybodies. Our first round of test tiles comes out of the kiln next week. I'll assess plasticity and how that impacts application properties before firing, then evaluate glaze fit and surface quality after.
And I'm developing a proposal for a client interested in converting their studio's entire glaze program from cone 10 to cone 6—a complex undertaking that requires reformulating each glaze while maintaining visual consistency and studio workflow. It's the kind of challenge that combines chemistry, aesthetics, and practical studio management. Complicated, but fun!
Current Inspiration
I'm reading The Entanglement by Alva Noë and Planetary Realism by Josephine Berry alongside having just finished The Capital of Dreams by Heather O'Neill.
Weirdly, Capital of Dreams is the second book I've read already this year involving angry trees that walk and exact revenge on those who don't respect their ways of knowing. I'm reminded of Treebeard and the Ents from the Lord of the Rings.
What connects these seemingly disparate texts is their exploration of agency beyond the human: Noë's investigation of how art and consciousness emerge through entanglement with the world, Berry's planetary perspective that decentralizes human experience, and O'Neill's vengeful arboreal beings that refuse passive objecthood. In my work, this manifests as attention to what materials want to do—how clay shrinks and warps, how glaze crawls or settles, how forms resist or embrace human intention. The sculptures I make are negotiations, not impositions.
What's Next
The long tail of Winter and a hopefully early Spring will be dedicated to teaching a new Hand-building Sculpture class at Wheelhouse Clay Center in Brattleboro, and building more shelves to hold all the work I've been making.
Connect
Visit my websites at MD-Ceramics.com and good-glaze.com Follow my practice on Instagram @mdceramics.goodglaze
Thank you for following these material investigations. The next update will arrive after the spring equinox.
