Associate Professor
University of Notre Dame
Designer, artist, and scholar working at the intersection of visual communication design, critical fabulation, and media aesthetics.
Recent News
UIC School of Design guest juror
m(other)ing exhibition open
forthcoming talk at Cornell
Ceramics
Hand-built ceramics, illustration, glazing
A collection of hand-built ceramics acting as both folk reliquary and speculative ritual artifact.
Concept
Melding sculptural form with narrative surface treatment, these ceramics interplay the symbolic utility and expressive absurdity of domestic objects: dishes, flasks, spoons, and vessels. Rendered as more than simply functional tools, these instruments become charged containers of allegory and myth. More than merely decorative, these speculative instruments are each inscribed with uncanny imagery that gestures toward protection, consumption, and transformation.
hand-building
ceramics
glazing
illustration
Here, the aesthetics of ethnographic ceramics and sacred votive offerings whisper from detailed inscribing into underglaze and slip: a wounded hand, an all-seeing eye, a grotesque hybrid portrait.
Central to the collection is its deep engagement with bodily metaphor. The implements of eating and drinking like spoons, plates, flasks, become extensions of the body, some even mimicking it directly: a ceramic spoon carved into a fox’s face, or a dish marked with hybridized human-animal features. This slippage between utensil and organism collapses boundaries between user and used, suggesting that consumption is not just physical but symbolic, emotional, and epistemological. The cracked glaze, muted palette, and hand-drawn line work invite touch and close reading, resisting the industrial polish of mass production in favor of an intimate, uneven materiality. Here, ceramics function not as mere craft, but as narrative surfaces—each plate or vessel a microcosm of a world built from memory, injury, humor, and care.
The ensemble refuses to resolve into a single cohesive taxonomy. Instead, it embraces variation and eccentricity as core design strategies. Eyes appear repeatedly, invoking themes of surveillance, spiritual vision, and agency. Plant life is embedded within the system, as in the tiny pot holding a succulent—suggesting growth, rot, and the porousness of animate and inanimate domains. What emerges is an ecology of enchanted objects: the ceramic language of the domestic reimagined through the lens of fabulation, feminist craft, and magical thinking. These works collectively reclaim ceramics as a speculative medium—one that does not simply serve but speaks, holds memory, and resists silence.