Rivers have been a huge part of my life for years. Flowing through the land around me, I grew up swimming, fishing, and climbing around the rivers of Oregon. Coming to Alaska things didn’t change much. I might spend less time swimming in them but they’ve never stopped being an integral part of my life. These vases were an outlet for the love I have for rivers. Each of their surfaces beautiful blue and flowing. Each vase is the name of a river in Alaska: Yukon, Copper, Tanana, Koyukuk, Kenai, Susitna, and Salmon. My family has a history in the Yukon’s waters. Not long after my grandparents got married they went on a trip down the Yukon. Only through hindsight they could see how turbulent that journey was.

These pieces were a departure from my normal work. I lean towards production pottery with a taste for functionality. Pottery serves as a hobby I pour my soul into and it helps tie me to a more serene approach to life. Cooking has done the same thing for me for years. It seemed fitting to tie the two parts of my life together as the inspiration for a pottery set. Onions and Leaks took functionality and threw it out the window in exchange for a more relaxed and creative approach to things I’ve made time and time again.

Withering Reef:

Carbon emissions from fossil fuels are a thing ever-present in our everyday lives. From gas-powered cars, ships, and planes, to industrial factories and large private businesses. The excess of these emissions is what is ripping the future of not only our oceans away but the future of the generations ahead of us away. Things like Ocean Acidification and Coral Bleaching events are widespread and happening at a steep, upward, linear rate. Over 50% of our oceans coral has died off from the stress of climate change that causes Coral Bleaching. Who’s to say we will even have these reefs in the next few decades? Over half a billion people on this earth rely on coral reefs across the globe as a food source. Withering Reef isn’t just a monster, it’s a monster of our own creation, a monster that we should be actively fighting against but choose not to. Instead, we push it on future generations, telling them that it’s their problem, it is not our problem. It is everyone’s problem. It is your problem. Change will only begin once you can recognize that. Change will only come if you can see that you share this planet and its resources just as much as everyone else. Change begins with you.

Pestilence was a creature made upon my own personal thoughts and ideas alone. What started out as a fun project slowly began to turn into something more. Nicknamed Turkey early on into his creation, he was simply a monster made for me. I treated him akin to that of a pet, someone close to me like a family member. I treated him as such and the people around me began to do this as well. He became a part of me that I never knew was there and making. When Pestilence was stuck in the school over covid, it also felt like I had lost a family member. I hadn’t seen him for months and soon enough hadn’t seen him in a few years. But upon reuniting with him I was given that part of me back. I was allowed to reconnect and have the inspiration back to finish painting him and giving him all the aspects of his character that were always there in my mind. Pestilence was a personal piece, a connective piece, I found comfort in my monster and my monster found comfort in me.