I was born and raised in Berkeley, California during the 1950's and 60's. As a child, I dreamed of becoming an artist and a teacher. As a young adult I felt societal transformation was more important and relevant than painting flowers and teaching children. I graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 1973 with a individual major in "Creative Politics." In l975 I was offered a job as an administrative assistant at the Institute of International Studies in Berkeley for two emerging individual major programs in Development Studies and Political Economy of Industrial Societies.
But my love for flowers, art, and teaching never died. I was introduced to ceramics on my lunch hour at the ASUC Studio on campus and I was hooked. A couple of years into my lunch hour studies I was also pregnant and found myself traveling down the road of making human vessels instead of ceramic ones.
About sixteen years ago I was reunited with clay after having long-since terminating my career at the University and as my children entered adolescence.I felt as though I had returned to a long abandoned love affair that I never wanted to end again. I resumed my ceramic studies Oakland's Studio One one morning a week. As my children got older I moved to The Potters Studio in Berkeley and tried to learn everything I could about clay. In 2006 I was able to create a studio in my own home and purchase a kiln.
My intense interest in flowers and color led me to study painting in order to better create floral imagery on my ceramic work. The challenge of transferring painting techniques on paper to the ceramic surface has been a long and often frustrating journey, but also a rewarding one. I am now expanding my ceramic explorations to include sculpture, which has opened up yet another dimension to my art making and the more I learn, the more I want to learn.
Over the past sixteen years I have also had the very good fortune to be able to develop my own teaching program in ceramics at a local after school program. So, in a rather curious and circuitous, way I am now doing precisely what I always wanted to do -- to be an artist and a teacher.
