Humans create stories and myths to find order in a chaotic world. Some stories are thousands of years old yet still have profound lessons for understanding the fragile balance we have with the natural world and society at large.
 
In my ceramic work it is through recognizing the power of animals in storytelling that I have found inspiration. The gestures of the human body can express a vast array of emotions and thoughts. The eyes alone can read as distracted, suspicious or innocent. It’s in the details of surface and use of color that the blending of the human with animal becomes credible. It is not that I want the animal to be anthropomorphized. In fact, it is the opposite I wish for.  In spending time adding texture, deciding what will be shiny or matte, studying an owl’s plumage or an Okapi’s zebralike legs, I find my ability to make the fiction that much more plausible. What if it became believable that our greatest power is in our most natural animal state? That perhaps it is not our “animalistic” state that leads to violence and corruption; it’s our human desire for a fictitious notion of power and scheme for control that create a corrupt and chaotic world.