ABOUT ME
Artist’s Statement
January 3, 2026
The life of an object ends when its meaning ends and begins when its meaning begins. Life, by this definition, extends beyond physical presence into the intangible. Life is not self-contained, but rather exists in others, bound to the feelings and memories contained in people - living and breathing - which impart meaning. Lacking a heartbeat, cognition, biology, an object’s life exists only in the intangible; its physical presence is not its life, but rather a token of its ability to inspire, absorb, possess, and divulge meaning. The object is the medium by which meaning - life - moves from intangible to tangible to intangible, from person to person. The meaning, and thus the life, is created within every individual affected by the art. An object comes alive by our imposition.
I’m deeply interested in exploring this intangible quality of meaning. What makes us bestow importance upon the everyday things we encounter? What are the factors we consider when finding meaningfulness in an experience? These qualities extend from memory, and are thereby rooted in emotion. We have so little control over white elicits emotion in us and what gets stored within our memory, yet these elemental forces precipitate the defining moments of our lives, and build up into the entirety of our character and purpose. These feelings and memories sit within us like vegetables in a soup, rising at their own will, waiting for us to accept and incorporate them or poke them back under the surface.
I work in this barely-controlled, intangible area without definition, axioms, or universal truths. The uncontrollable material of wild clay, and the uncontrollable process of wood firing are suited to this way of working.
b. 1991; Glenville, Pennsylvania, USA
I live in Germany now, more than a decade of experience in architectural practice behind me, a few years of furniture fabrication scattered in there, a youth spent in the countryside with dirty hands and feet all summer long, a Bachelor of Architecture degree earned in Philadelphia, stints at acclaimed architectural practices in New York City and Los Angeles, six months drying out in Death Valley and the Mojave, and later Connecticut.
The first time I worked with clay was at five years old. I made the local newspaper purely because of my fascination, not because of any innate talent or skill. We couldn’t buy or find a potter’s wheel or a kiln. Instead, I was taught woodworking. I had my first block plane, chisels, and handsaws when I was four years old, a gift from my Oma; my dad was a furniture maker, and for Christmas I received a work bench, and that became my life.
Clay didn’t find me again until 2021, living in the protected lands of the Wild and Scenic Amargosa River, the river that terminates at Badwater Basin in Death Valley, the world’s hottest place, the United States’ lowest point of elevation, without cell service, off-grid. I had a motorcycle, a few changes of clothes, several buckets and a shovel, and a few liters of water. I hiked into the badlands behind China Ranch, an oasis centered on the Willow Creek, the only freshwater spring within about thirty kilometers, where I found a cave some fifteen meters high, maybe fifty meters deep, carved from clay that had landed in the dry desert four hundred thousand years earlier when that part of the world was an immense lake. From the cave I hauled thirty or forty kilos of the earth out in buckets, hiking eight kilometers back to my home, bruised and tired.
I built a kiln, fired with mesquite and cottonwood chopped from the desert scrub. From Day One it was wild clay and wood fire. All the rest, with the help of so many knowledgeable friends and teachers, came later.
Biography
“ ‘How do you get the clay’, he asked. Hughes told him that he finds some in the stream near his house. His mother almost winced, [...] she could envision her determined son down there digging for clay.”
