I initially chose Taos, New Mexico, as a place to pursue ceramics because of its rich history as an art enclave, but also because of its inherent beauty. I am constantly inspired and a muse to Mother Nature as I take ski laps in the backcountry or ride my bike along the rift of the Rio Grande. People who come here come to relish its soft adobe architecture, bask in its incredibly rich light, and gaze off at its distant puffed cloud horizon lines. It draws you in and swallows you up; your only choice is to surrender and create something beautiful from its rawness.
When I first came to Taos in 2006, I was young and impressionable. I knew that I wanted to make a go at being a ceramic artist; however, I was a little intimidated about how to get started. Little did I realize that a wood fire community was about to take shape. John Bradford had moved to Taos from Massachusetts just a year prior and found a resource for extremely cheap firebrick. The firebrick was located in a defunct coal-fired electric energy plant just across the Colorado border. All we had to do was haul it back down to New Mexico, clean it up, and build a wood kiln. It took several of us just short of a year to build a long tube anagama. While we built the kiln, I took over the small community class studio that had been started several years prior. I started offering ceramics classes, summer workshops with visiting artists, and a residency. I would lease a private studio, gallery space, kiln space, and twenty-four-hour communal access through a keypad on the front door. It was rustic; my only heat source was a giant wood stove in the winter, and what I had inherited in the community studio space and kilns needed a lot of maintenance. Over the course of the next ten years, we developed a community based around wood-fired pottery. We built a wood, soda, and charcoal kiln and had community firings out on the Taos Mesa every six months. Over the course of the next decade, I took in ceramics voraciously and started to develop a body of work.
