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Horses were my first teachers. They showed me how to listen without words, how to move with instinct, how to communicate silently. Those lessons have never left me.

I grew up in Prospect, Kentucky (on the country outskirts of Louisville); pasture to pasture of horses in my backyard. Every day I drive past fields of Kentucky Thoroughbred Sanctuary farms and routinely walk the roads that parallel the paddocks of the broodmares and retired racehorses. I’m ten miles away from Churchill Downs where the legendary Kentucky Derby takes place every year (“The most exciting two minutes in sports”), which I celebrate more religiously (almost) than Christmas. You may have even seen me on the local news kissing my husband as the horses crossed the finish line, or seen me and my pink friends featured at the Kentucky Oaks!  I began the study of ceramics in 2015. As a local to the city, I’ve also spent time volunteering at the local Raptor Rehab of Kentucky, Inc., focusing on saving birds of prey (hawks, falcons, eagles, vultures). My favorite pasttime is flying in the famous single engine Skyhawk aircraft above the city of Louisville, and radioing to the other private jets the names of the farms at birdseye view below (if they’re lucky enough to be on my frequency).

Since I was a little girl I learned the diligence of what it’s like to learn under a trainer, mentor, and teacher; animal & human.  In my work, you will see a combination of all the lessons I’ve learned through rehabilitating & husbandry of animals, riding & competing… flying in the air or on a horse. 

Personally, I continuously search for the inner-body and spiritual feeling, a physical and mental sensation, you can obtain from my work. From perfectly centering on the wheel, perfectly taking off on trot on the correct diagonal, perfectly lifting from the runway in a single-propellor, driving a ball of the tee, all these sensations are parallel to one another. There is no one word that can describe what I’m attempting to explain with many; perhaps it’s similar to a persons’ own journey in finding God. You can be taught these things at a church, but each own person has their own story to tell in their beliefs; a story that can’t be repeated in experience to another. This is my own story.

The clay body I use is rooted in my childhood and the childhood of this country from generations before me. Obtained by hand with a spare gut bucket; and traversed back with the will of human ingenuity on the back of a steel-winged jet-fueled dragon. 

The land that sources my clay body is an old one, an original place, a founding land, a lost land forgotten by the nation by the exception of me. In the days it was settled it was foretold this island uninhabitable, too wild to make home here…. and yet it was on this land our great nation fought itself over for. Battlefields have now been tilled for buckwheat and burned homes from the war now neighbor our modern camps. 

The river rises and dries with the seasons within the year, washing and unwashing this forgotten historical island. Only accessible by ferry boat or plane; the Mississippi relentlessly bathes the island into its form, making generational homes in the ever changing deltas. The red iron saturates the soil, staining the natural and manmade(family made) levees and river banks in a color that encapsulates our nations greatest plethora collection of secondary clay, in loo of the Earths largest running river. My family has vowed to the land for honest use of its abundance; for the good of the island and our family. Since the day I was born I have the great privilege of witnessing the slow unfolding of this acreage. This lost American Shrine is now today one of the last pure paradises in our nation, carefully (arguably chaotically) pruned to perfection. 

Many Americans are familiar with the Great White Oak, known to grow across upland and bottomland. Few Americans have witnessed these magnificent trees as they were, native, wild, and…. magnificently large. The last great oaks of America stand here, native and not part of the exotically introduced flora that litters our lands; producing acorns with over three hundreds years of nutrients in their roots, and centuries count of resiliency to Mississippi’s forceful floodwaters.

This is the place I source my work: in the flood-prone alluvial soils that favor flood-tolerant oaks in hardwood forests. Its oftener flippantly referred to as “the island” in my family’s common talk, but I wish to omit any tropical beaches that may form in mind, and replace it instead with landscape shaped by the strongest force in nature, with battle scars marked on trees that hold distinguished water mark lines eluding to the chronicles of one of the oldest waters in the world (and sourced as the worlds’ 4th largest); with battle scars marked by man himself, as he defaces his own kind in mid 1800s. 

The roads I drive on the island today are pathed over the same route the island was introduced to centuries ago. Roads first paved by horses and wagons, who were luxuriously transported across the border of river by steamboat. American coal for steamboats to American oil for modern ferryboats; blacksmithed steel horse shoes to 720 horsepower engines. All have touched the ground first in which I harvest my arts’ body from. The very family famous levees are keystone prodigious forms of clay that influence the landscape; first built by the Freedman and Freedwoman, whose first choice was to move this clay into form to make home…. Now maintained today, hidden along cow fields. Yet still unmarked and free, the only way to navigate to the ferry port is to first cross the levee by counting the cow guards, and somehow recognizing the standard-seen-everyday electric pole personally built for the islands modern source of electricity. 

The sky reflects our galaxy, quite literally, the Milky Way lives as what seems a hand grasp away, throwing its purple, pinks, blues, yellows into every night. Colors the human eye cannot witness, nor have the ability to beyond the common towns’ light pollution. No cloud here is molested by other commercial aerials; the right is left to our own family’s Skyhawks. Shooting stars grant wishes every night, even visible before the sun ever sets, and the moon gently wakes the evening and night. Bioluminescence (…unmistakably definitely fairies!) glitters along the floor of the forest during the dusky hours, instilling the sense of magic into even the most hardened southern man.