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The Past

I was born and raised in rural Georgia, the youngest of three children.

I graduated from St. John's College in Santa Fe, New Mexico in 1987. A small liberal arts college, St. John’s is known as the ‘Great Books School’ because students read and discuss the most influential books of the western world in chronological order, beginning with Plato, with no electives and no tests. At St. John’s I was deeply influenced by the writings of Dostoevsky, and went on to study the Russian language for three years following my graduation. After a summer at the University of Leningrad in 1989, I moved to New York City on a whim, where I got a job at a Japanese bank to pay the rent and try something new. I was trained as a money market trader and worked for Gunma Bank for five years.

My experience in clay is unusual. My co-workers at the bank introduced me to the world of Japanese ceramics, and a show of 17th century Korean celadon ceramics at the Metropolitan Museum of Art marked a defining moment in my life. Noticing my obsession, a co-worker then introduced me to a small Japanese pottery studio in Manhattan, where I began attending evening classes in 1992 while continuing to work full-time at the bank. I wanted to learn more - about digging clay and firing with wood - so I left New York and sought out an apprenticeship in Japan in 1994. Concentrating on the Karatsu area in northwest Kyushu, I visited studios until I found an artist whose work I especially admired, and after being accepted as his apprentice, worked for him for 4½ years. My training was intensive.

In 1999 I completed my apprenticeship and returned to New Mexico to buy a remote plot of land in the mountains north of Santa Fe, and built a house with a studio, and brick-by-brick, my own wood-fired kiln.

The Present, The Future "The work makes the work."

With tradition as my foundation, there is another strong force in my work: the innate desire to experiment with ideas and materials, to move closer and closer to authenticity, however hard that is to define. My friend Emily said, "It's like being right on the edge of not knowing what you're doing."

I find the concept of objects that relate to one another and that express an idea without losing any of their usefulness very compelling, and I love lines, abstract loose lines and lines of detailed drawings and quick sketches.

I have been a full-time artist since 2001. My husband, Mark Saxe, and I own Rift Gallery in Rinconada, New Mexico, south of Taos along the Rio Grande rift valley.

Please click here to see my current resume.