My work focuses on alienation—the prevailing theme of our moment. We are constantly becoming more isolated from each other as we become more reliant on technology to work, communicate and maintain relationships. Ceramics allows me to describe alienation through bodies, be they biological forms, abstract sculptures, or functional work.

This past year, my practice focused on how we protect ourselves from each other and how we separate others from ourselves. The pandemic has accelerated these trends that were already dominant in our society—leading to a collective experience of social withdrawal. I use ceramics as an emotional barometer to both discover and express how it feels to be alienated and the process of pushing the social away. These processes make their presence felt in the shapes and deformations of bodies.

My objects create a space in which multiple viewpoints and perspectives on the individual and the other live side by side. I want to create an omniscient view that allows people to step back and reflect on their individualism. By abstracting beyond literal biological bodies while still referencing their common contours, I create a visual language to describe this alienation through the shape of objects.

When I am making functional work, I am still thinking about alienation, but in a oneiric way. These objects bring the content of dreams into a shared space. A lot of my functional pieces are inspired by the aesthetic of old science fiction movies and religious art. These reveries present the data of our unconscious—what the body itself generates to describe its condition.