January 2021

For five years I had worked exclusively in black, white, gray, silver, and gold, making ceramic reliefs with textured surfaces in this range. After 9 months of pandemic living in 2020, I craved the reintroduction of color into my ceramic materials and artworks. I also wished for the chance to reflect on color, the color choices of my works from decades past, and to consider new approaches to color and its relationship to texture. During the residency I read about and sensitized myself to a wide range of hue and tonal range via play with watercolor pigments.

During my 10 days in Matfield Green, the sun came out for only a few hours. It was cloudy and cold. In my other visits to the Flint Hills, the weather had been brilliantly sunny, intensifying color in the landscape. Over my time living in the Prairie Outpost cottage, peering out the windows as I sat at the large dining-table-turned-watercolor-workspace, my experiments with pigments and my ruminations and readings about color heightened my perceptions of those I saw around me. Most memorable was my study of the grassy prairie—I had never been so aware of the wide and subtle range of colors, particularly the purples, perhaps made more evident by the overcast sky.

February – March 2021

Upon my return to Kansas City, I entered my studio energized to gather ceramic color. I spent several weeks creating dozens of ceramic hues, utilizing the colors inherent in fired, unfinished clay bodies as well as in my mixtures of underglazes, glazes, and overglazes. I applied these to small slabs of various kinds of clays, from porcelain white to mineral-rich reds, browns, and blacks. As always, but with an expanded interest, I noticed how the same glaze could change depending on the clay color it was applied to.  I also continued an in-depth exploration with glaze texture, from deeply pebbled and grooved surfaces to crystallized, speckled, and metallic.

March – October 2021

For a solo exhibition in November 2021 at Sherry Leedy Contemporary Art, I distilled my color choices for a series of relief sculptures. Along with a renewed interest in the use of precious metal surfaces of gold, platinum, and copper, I found that cool colors such as blue and green, present in my work for decades past, stayed constant. They evolved into a greater variety in concert with the textures on which I applied them.

I also found myself pushing to mix ceramic colors to attain more specific hues—a blue-black, a saturated orange-red. Most surprising to me was my development, and use of, a metallic purple hue and texture. I have rarely if ever made purple pieces of ceramic! They are the direct reflection of gazing into the field of prairie grasses, distinguishing the purple hues, and giving them another life in the fired minerals of ceramics.