When did you start working in ceramics?
I got into art in high school and during my senior year realized I wanted to go to art school but I got denied form a bunch of them. I was pretty bummed out but realized that I just needed to make more art and get better at creating. I ended up going to a community college that was kind of known for its ceramics program— in the area, and I was immediately hooked. So I set my mind to it and made my first body of work, I would say, that I then applied to art school with and ended up getting into KCAI which has a well known ceramics program. But the curriculum was very extreme, classic art school shit — and it was a total whirlwind to me. They basically made you choose between vessel or sculpture, so I chose vessel which then resulted in making hundreds of cups and bowls and plates. Basically learning every skill I needed to get ready to create “real work.” At the time it was all very technical, so we would throw most of what we made out. When I got to my senior year of art school, I was very excited to just have some fun, and as a result ended up making bongs and ashtrays and pipes. Just all of these disapproved objects in ceramics. The taboo of it really interested me, but I was also just a shit-head stoner, so I was like “ah this is cool, I wanna make some bongs.” I realized that I was embodying that stoner kid that would sneak bongs through the kiln and try to make wacky, funny work that excited me. So from there I really started to explore making those taboo items, which is kind of where I’m at today.
I know it’s weird talking about high school and art school in an interview about my artwork now, but it’s also a part of my life, and that’s really how I started making art and I can’t forget about that. I’ve always tried to stay away from talking about that in interviews, but I don’t know, you can do what you want with it.
I think in our society there’s an unnecessary taboo around immaturity, so we try and separate our present selves from our youth, maybe it comes with trying to contrive nobility into adulthood, but we don’t want to bring the learned and matured versions of ourselves back down to that level of youthful naivety. At the same time it’s such a formative part of all of our experiences, whether you’re a creative or not, and I think it’s odd that we actively try to disassociate ourselves from perhaps the most formative part of our lives. I mean its still us, regardless of age. Something I like about the way you utilize your medium is that you don’t omit those youthful and nostalgic qualities. The pieces remind me of being in kindergarten, playing with air dry clay. But it’s elevated because the work isn’t coming from a kindergartener.
For a long time I’ve really thought about authenticity, and what I’ve realized is that, for me, a lot of this started because I wanted to replicate objects that I either couldn’t get or that didn’t exist. Recreating Supreme accessories, or making fake merchandise from brands that didn’t exist. And I’ve found that the most genuine output when creating that is to be able to render these objects very naively. The raw output is very important to the work, that raw naivety. So it really does come down to having the ability to make something very well, a high level of craftsmanship, but still being able to use it to say different things without compromising its utility or appearance. But it’s important to me to make it look naive, I think it adds a side of humor to the work. If I were to render a lot of these objects realistically, whatever that means, so much of it would get lost, it would lose its authenticity.