Artist Bio

Emily Albee is a ceramic artist and educator based in Connecticut. She holds an MFA in Ceramics from Georgia State University and a BFA from the Hartford Art School at the University of Hartford. She is currently Adjunct Faculty in Ceramics and Sculpture at the University of Connecticut, where she teaches across foundations and advanced studio courses. Her sculptural and functional ceramic work draws inspiration from close observation of the natural world, translating botanical forms into intimate vessels.

Artist Statement

My ceramic vessels are inspired by close, sustained attention to my home garden. Through the act of gathering seeds, I follow plants through cycles of emergence, flowering, and decay—a quiet dance between life and death. This practice of deliberate witnessing shapes the work as botanical structures are abstracted through gesture, texture, and containment. Surface becomes a site of accumulation and transformation, built through layered slips, carving, subtle shifts in texture, and prolonged wood firing. Fired for up to seventy-two hours, the work extends the cycles observed in the garden into the kiln itself, where fire, ash, and flame act as active collaborators. Ash settles and melts across the surface while heat softens, scars, and alters the clay in unpredictable ways. Through these processes, the vessels become intimate records of duration, care, and material change.