Clay Art Center

Deborah Schwartzkopf: 

In the gallery will be a plethora of whimsical and colorful thrown-and-altered functional forms - everything from pitchers and mugs to complex multi-part vases.  About her work, Deborah states, “I find it rewarding and challenging to make pots people will use. In my home growing up, handmade objects held special value and were gestures of consideration and love. I enjoy the community that eating together builds, and I find it meaningful to make beautiful serving vessels. Pots are a place where I can combine abstraction of emotion, personal meaning, and relation to environment.  In order to carry this metaphor, I work to create vessels that will live within the kitchen and celebrate life with practical beauty. I build porcelain forms whose defining lines and soft planes are both geometric and sensual. With elegant and animated form, I merge nature’s placement of hue to imply function, trigger associations, and to call for exploration.

“My process consists of building and throwing cylinders that are altered and join them to parts made of slabs.  These slab built sections are shaped in a combination of the following ways: patterned and cut out, modeled or slumped over bisque clay molds. This complex process also informs the shapes my mind envisions; puzzling over these pieces helps spur new forms. Form, in turn, brings me back to surface.  I find them intertwined, both integral and defining. I know I have reached my goal when my work communicates a playful, enticing energy and adds to a sense of discovery as it is used.”

Deborah Schwartzkopf currently lives in Seattle, WA where she is an artist in residence at Pottery Northwest. She has just returned after traveling for school, residencies, and jobs.  She received her BA at the University of Alaska 1999 and MFA from Penn State in 2003.   She also participated in residencies at San Bao Ceramic Art Institute in China, the Archie Bray Foundation in Montana, and the Ceramics Workshop in Berlin.