Ted Adler

Artist Statement

Clay is interesting to me as both a material and a metaphor. When making, I look to engage a sense of “madeness” through the plasticity of the material and the sensuous, fluid volumes of the vessel. The rich, varied surfaces of wood-firing convey the change and flux of the kiln environment. These processes tend to capture the sense of clay’s protean malleability that enhances way that the objects might be interpreted as a metaphor for the fugitive nature of experience. By using the vessel as an analogy for selfhood and subjecting it to processes of forming and firing that lend themselves to a sense of transformation (which is both actual and figural), I hope to elicit a sense that our relationship to ourselves and the world around us is more slippery than we ordinarily like to admit.

-- Ted Adler