WRITING My background in art & material has given me an unshakable connection to the physical, corporeal world, the world of compromise and solution. I am particularly interested in how collective ideas shape and mold our perceptions of the world and how these new perceptions are reflected in the environments we construct for ourselves.I often write as a way to understand, as a way to tease out ideas that I have been mulling over. A truck pulls up behind a shop in Niagara Falls as you walk in thef ront door. You buy an ashtray or a mug or a refrigerator magnet. None of those things were made here, they don’t belong here anymore than you do. You collect your object and you both go somewhere else.
“Resemblance and Desire” Essay for Studio Potter all about porcelain, it’s strange material history and the even stranger meanings we have assigned to it.
“Mirrors of Influence-Aesthetics and Agenda” Illustrated slide talk presented at NCECA and later at CAA. The premise was how all of the decisions enclosed in an object from design to material to method of manufacture have been used to reinforce and grow social and political agendas Darkness and Decoration, an illustrated talk presented in Wales,examined the role that cast iron played in the decorative arts during the 100-year period that marks the shift from the Victorian age to Modernism. I looked at the ways that cast iron has been used both as a reflection and anchor of cultural values and anxieties.
“Consuming the Other” Talk given at NCECA, looked at the relationship between lithographs and transfer printing in pre-1850, pre-copyright Britain and the construction of stories about the consumption of culture.
“Ceramic as Souvenir” Presented at NCECA, the World Tourism conference in Brighton UK, and at the Visible Memories symposium in Syracuse, NY. Here I explored how objects can function as a concretion of loss.
The Nature of Color, NCECA looked at the meanings that have been assigned to color and how those meanings shift over time to support new sorts of agendas
