I hand-build sculptural ceramic vessels reimagining historical forms with rhythmic, ornately patterned surfaces. The works are crafted using a coil-and-pinch technique that intentionally accentuates the marks of my fingers, providing a visual language reminiscent of ancient handprints on cave walls, records of time, touch, and material. I am fascinated by the historical use of clay and what it reveals about the human experience; from a deep-time perspective, clay helps me contemplate larger scales of time and their connection to the present, including human influence on the global climate.
My practice centers intentional processes and a deep connection to place. I see my work as inextricably linked to the greater web of life: tangibly, through using the clay beneath my feet, and more abstractly through concepts of time on both a human and geologic scale. I favor locally sourced materials: clay, salt, and wood for firing kilns, which provide both an aesthetic and conceptual framework. The foraging of these materials is itself a communal practice, rooted in reciprocal relationships with the land and the beings who inhabit it. Images inspired by local ecology take shape within the patterns and emphasize connection to the environment from which the materials are extracted; handprints metamorphose into a spiral shell, a pelvic bone, a bird's beak.
The forms and surfaces of the work are distinctly feminine, and this is central to its meaning. Within western art historical tradition, decorative embellishment has been cast as frivolous, a designation entangled with the broader coding of nature as feminine and the constructed world as masculine. In reinterpreting historical forms through richly patterned surfaces drawn from the ecology of place, my practice refuses this hierarchy, reclaiming the feminine, the decorative and the natural in order to imagine a new paradigm.
I recognize that many of these ideas are not new, and indigenous cultures have and continue to share knowledge about interconnection and the importance of reciprocity.
Grace Potter is an artist and educator based in Mendocino, CA. She received her BFA in Ceramics with minors in Art History and Anthropology from the University of Colorado, Boulder (2018). She has exhibited in galleries and museums both nationally and internationally, including the Bolinas Museum, Bolinas, CA; Fellows of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; and University of Colorado Art Museum, Boulder, CO. She has been awarded several residencies, including Township 10, Marshall, NC; and the Mendocino Art Center, Mendocino, CA. In addition to an active studio practice, she currently works as an Instructor and Ceramic Technician for Mendocino College.