Artist Statement

My pottery draws on Norwegian folk art and my family's farm — a cabin my ancestor built in Iowa in 1856. It began with my great-grandmother's rosemaling on furniture my great-grandfather built, leading to the ale bowl — a Norwegian farmhouse vessel for weddings, funerals, and harvests since the 1500s. I remember that warmth from my family's Christmases, crowded into my great-grandmother's living room singing hymns in broken Norse.

The dragon-headed form I love carries a different history: a Viking-revival image inspired by the Oseberg ship and its animal heads. Ancestral homelands are both myth and reality for American descendants of immigrants, and I hold both histories at once: the working object, and the myth layered onto it. I counter the lore of my upbringing by embracing my forebears as farmers.

As my hands feel, pinch, turn, lift, and heft the soft clay, I contemplate my ancestors' toiling with their hands in the earth. I throw with Missouri clay and glaze with Kansas volcanic ash, then let the kiln's flame billow and roll, scarring the surface, showing through as color inspired by the Midwest landscape.

Working a kick wheel is meditative: my feet propel the vessel in a steady rhythm, echoing my ancestors' pace behind a plow. My forms echo the rich practice of working the land, manifesting as clay walls that swell like rolling hills, vertical ridges carved like plow-scraped fields, that meet a wave-like rim. This artistic labor shapes the cups, teapots, and platters I make daily, uniting the farmer and the academic at a common table.