Ayumi Horie
BIO:
Ayumi Horie is a studio potter in Portland, Maine who makes functional pottery with drawings of animals. In 2015, she was awarded a Distinguished Fellow in Craft grant from the United States Artists Foundation. She runs Pots In Action, a curatorial project on Instagram that features international ceramics and recently completed a collaborative public art project, Portland Brick, that repairs city sidewalks with bricks stamped with past, contemporary, and future memories. In 2011, she was the first recipient of Ceramics Monthly’s Ceramic Artist of the Year award. She has organized multiple online fundraisers including Obamaware in 2008 and Handmade For Japan in 2011. She is currently on the board of the American Craft Council and accessCeramics.org.
STATEMENT:
My work attempts to deepen connections between people and their communities, serving both a physical purpose and as a vehicle to open the softer side of a person. I want to explore individual vulnerability by drawing images that evoke an emotional response and also explore how public art invites a community to deepen their link to one another and to their sense of home.
My work has multiple directions- functional ceramics, tote bags, photography, social media and social practice. My primary work for the last twenty years has been that of a studio potter. I use imperfections in form as evidence of human vulnerability to link the user to the maker. I am interested in the anti-masterpiece and the anti-monumental, because I think one kind of meaningful connection to an object, and by extension another person, takes place through daily interaction in intimate domestic spaces.
My pottery, photography, Pots In Action and my collaborative public art project, Portland Brick, reflect my interest in relational aesthetics. The dialogue and impact on both parties is concrete. Much of my work is given as gifts, and the social exchange aspect of my practice overlaps with my explorations in community projects that have participatory elements, storytelling components, and even fundraising goals supporting social change.
To find out more about Haystack Mountain School of Crafts
To find out more about Ayumi Horie
This video is for Artaxis conversations during National Clay Week 2019 – "Resources"