On surrendering to chance

You first encountered pottery as a teenager. It can be so hard to get the hang of centering your clay and all of that—was it an immediate affinity, or did it take time to develop?

I started working with clay when I was 14, a freshman in high school. My portfolio for art school was mostly drawing. And then I decided to go into ceramics because I was pretty passionate about it. I did a little bit of throwing right before I got to RISD, and I do enjoy it. But I’m primarily interested in hand building. [Clay] is a very difficult material across the board. For a while, I was outsourcing the throwing to my friend, who would just make me the cylinders and then I would glaze them. Now, I’m back into throwing, but I don’t do it as often. Personally, I like to stand while I work. Throwing is messy. It’s not my cup of tea. I honestly try to avoid it as much as possible.

As a writer, I’m often trying to be so precise with each word, so I’m fascinated by an artistic practice like ceramics where there is this element of chance or risk. With your pieces, how much of the outcome is something you’re trying to control and how much of it is a surprise?

It is very controlled. And I do really love the chance aspect of putting the work in a kiln and surrendering the piece to 2,000 degrees. Things can become dicey, especially with the larger pieces of glaze that I put on top of my sculptures. Sometimes they fall off, sometimes they slide off. Sometimes if I don’t mix it properly I don’t get a desirable result. But that is pretty subjective. What is desirable to other people is not desirable to me. I do have a lot of control, but the element of surprise is always what makes ceramics exciting. There’s this kind of cliché in ceramics, like, “You open the kiln every day and it’s like the most exciting feeling. It’s like a dopamine hit.” And I fire my kiln every day. I get to work and I’m like, “Oh my god, what’s going to happen? Is it going to work or is it not going to work?” And with my technique and my experience over the years, my success rate is extremely high. So it’s not like I’m slapping a bunch of glazes together and hoping for the best. I would never be able to sustain that. It is a push and pull, and that’s what’s so exciting.

Your work is so inspired by nature and natural elements. When you’re interpreting something on a massive scale—like a volcano or a huge sinkhole or a rainforest—through a sculpture, how does that process work?

I’m translating that experience through memory in an abstract way. I really thought it was important to me and my work and my progress to go experience these things up close and personal. I started traveling in 2016 when I got my studio. I realized that I had a lot of time on my hands and I had the resources to finally leave the country. I didn’t have the privilege to travel when I was younger, so my first kind of transcendental experience in nature was the Sierra Negra crater on Isabella Island in the Galapagos. I knew at that moment that it would have a big impact on me, but I didn’t realize the extent it would inspire me. When I got back in studio, it happened organically.

For two and a half years [before that], I was working on a very intimate scale on the vessel shape, and then I started making these fully formed sculptures. They weren’t translating the way I wanted them to, and then I took these big fully formed sculptures that I made and I broke them in half with a hammer and then it became two vessels. Then I would dunk them in these big baths of slip and they became super sculptural. And that’s where the giant hole kind of emerged. Now I consider my cylindrical paint cans, that’s what I call them, a separate body of work. And I mostly work on the more abstract forms that are much larger and much more sophisticated that are inspired by all these places that I’ve been to. But it wasn’t me getting back, fantasizing about all these places, and then sketching ideas out. It wasn’t like that at all. I just got to work and it happened. And I feel like that’s the best outcome for me.

As your career and work have progressed, how do you think about carving out the time to be able to travel?

From 2016 to 2022, I did most of the traveling. It was a really good schedule. I don’t have that anymore. I have a dog, so there are places that I didn’t get to go to that I really regret not going to.

My thing for the past six or seven years has been high volume. I focus on maybe three to four pieces at a time, and if something doesn’t work, I can tweak it or I abandon it or I’ll introduce a new texture or a new color. My first big offer was in New York in 2017. That was right after I went to the Galapagos and Belize and Africa. That was a pivotal time for me. I evolved pretty rapidly. But then I would get bored, or I would think, 10 pieces is enough in two months. So I would go on another trip, get inspired, come back. And surprisingly, when I get back into the studio, I come up with new ideas and I attack them pretty quickly. Usually with my intuition with materials and glazes and formulations and whatnot, my results come pretty fast. So two months off work is not so bad. Another thing that’s kind of important: when I make sculptures in studio, I always try to make the next one better. Year over year, I’m trying to get better and better. I did that with traveling. I was like, what’s crazier than the Bolivian Amazon? All right, Papua New Guinea. Or maybe I could go to sacred Vanuatu or West Africa or something. I went to like 30 different countries, so I have so much collected data and memories and photographs that I can look at for inspiration.

When you’re working in your studio, what is one thing that you always have to have? And is there anything you do not allow into that space?

It’s mostly myself. I’ve had assistants before, but that was mostly to build pretty rudimentary forms, and then I would take over. Nobody can glaze for me—I’m the only one that can do it. I like to listen to music. That’s the first thing I do: put on music and clean. My studio is pretty spotless. I do need things to be tidy or I can’t really focus. So music and my dog. Things that I don’t allow? I try not to let in groups of students.

You are really pushing the limits of what your kiln can accommodate, size-wise. What are your ambitions for the scale of the work that you’re creating?

These are the biggest pieces I have ever worked on. There are a couple pieces in here that I can’t lift myself. And they go all the way up to the edge of the kiln, which can have an impact on the melt of the glaze. So that is problematic. I mean, they’re bigger than my shoulders by double. I don’t want to make these outside of my studio. I don’t have this burning desire to make something massive. Not yet. But if I do decide I want to, there are places where I can. I don’t need multiple kilns. I know some people who have like five or six. My electricity bill is high enough.

Since I work by myself and I prefer to work by myself, I’m not willing to have two or three assistants assist me from start to finish by rotating these upside down and on their sides while I glaze. Nor will I do that by myself because I don’t want to injure myself locked in my studio. But it is something I think about pretty often. What if I made this twice the size? How will it change? It’s amazing how much information you can pack into a cubic foot of sculpture.

You’ve done fashion collaborations with designers like Berluti and Dries Van Noten. It doesn’t seem like the most natural translation to take something tactile and 3D like your work and flatten it into a print, so what was that like?

The collaboration was really interesting. Kris Van Assche [of Berluti] is legendary and I didn’t really know how that was going to turn out. I was like, “What do you mean by collaborate? Do you want me to come up with a design for a bag or sweater? And they’re like, “No, we’re going to superimpose [your work], and not in a very simple, silkscreen way. They’re going to be highly developed like your surfaces with high quality materials and embroidery and leather and all sorts of beautiful fabrics.” They transformed all of the Berluti stores and kind of tailored it to my style, my motif. And they sold a lot. Celebrities all over were wearing it. My friends were like, “Oh, hey, look—the rapper Tyga is wearing it on SNL,” or Joe Jonas or Nick Jonas or Machine Gun Kelly. I mean, the first thing I thought was, “Oh, man I should have asked for more money.” When I saw them in real life, I was so excited, because the quality is exceptional. Even though my work might appear experimental or—I don’t think people really say this anymore—”sloppy,” it’s not. They are expressive and they look experimental, but they’re actually manicured. They’re elegant and they’re layered. There’s a lot of care that goes into them and a lot of different firings and steps. It’s very structured.

As somebody who’s working alone in the studio so frequently, how do you think about community? Do you feel you have a community of other artists?

I do feel slightly isolated, even though I’ve been in LA for a long time. I like to keep to myself. I do have some really great friends. Earlier today I was at Aaron Garber-Maikovska’s enormous studio in Glendora. And he’s an amazing abstract painter. I was there for hours talking about his paintings. I do ceramics and I’ve been doing it all my life, but I’m incredibly inspired by non-representational painting. I love color and I love texture and I love mark making. But I get nervous talking about other people’s paintings. And here I am in this this guy’s studio, who is very successful, and he’s asking me questions and I’m like, “Oh my god, I don’t want to say the wrong thing.” And then I start talking and I realize that I do have a lot of information about this material that I don’t use. I can still talk about it in a similar way to how I glaze.

There are a lot of people working in ceramics in Los Angeles. But it is very separated and pretty fractured. There are ceramics people I really admire. A lot of them are from the East Coast. We do communicate on social media and whatnot. We do follow each other. We do support each other. And they’re not people that I hang out with, we don’t go for dinners or anything like that, but I hold them close to my heart. But I would say that my closest friends are working in painting. Another example is Spencer Lewis who is right down the street from me. I actually bought one of his paintings not knowing that he was right down the street. This is like a 7 1/2-foot painting that I shipped from New York, not knowing he was walking distance. I could have walked it to my studio, no joke.

Okay, most important question. Do you have a sense of what your dog, Terry, thinks of your sculptures?

Terry’s the most beautiful dog. He goes everywhere with me. I’ve had him for almost seven years. He’s a big inspiration. He has little toys and balls all over my studio. I love to photograph him with my sculptures. But for the most part he chills on his couch. I have a custom doghouse in here made out of solid maple that he’s never been in. He has a custom ramp that goes up to the couch and he kind of hangs out and he stares at me all day. I think if he could understand, he would appreciate them.