Clay in the DNA

I’ve come to ceramics more recently. I attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the 1990s where I earned a BFA with a concentration in Printmaking and Art & Technology and for much of my professional life I worked in graphic design. In 2015 I was looking for something to do with my hands that did not involve sitting in front of a screen so I took a ceramics class at the Berkeley Art Studio. In the process I discovered an intuitive feel for the pottery wheel, something I put down to having spent a chunk of my childhood training to be a ballet dancer—orienting myself around a spinning axis felt strangely familiar. I’ve been obsessed with the wheel ever since.

I grew up in San Francisco’s Mission District surrounded by handmade ceramics. My mother comes from a family of Hungarian immigrant artists: my grandfather, Stephen Deutch, was a photographer and his brother Eugene was a talented potter who worked in Chicago from the 1930s to the 50s, absorbing the ideas of Modernism firsthand. Gene died before I was born so I only know him through stories, photos and the pots and sculptures that are scattered around the homes of my relatives.