Meet Kitt

Clay found me a few years ago, and then it didn't let go. I took a class, then another, then bought bags of clay and tools I didn't yet know how to use. I took private lessons, group lessons, workshops. I got a wheel. I learned that the process can center me before I've even touched the clay, and that what I think I'm making and what actually comes off the wheel are often two different things.

I came to clay by way of a career listening to people, not art school — a BA in psychology at UCLA, an MA in counseling at California State University, Sacramento. But what actually shaped how I see form and surface was years spent traveling abroad for business: standing in front of art and ceramics at the Louvre and the Prado, walking through Greece and Italy. I brought ceramic pieces home from my first trip to Europe at twenty, years before I ever touched a wheel.

My grandparents arrived in California from Germany, Mexico, Ireland, and Scotland. My German grandmother set her table with fine porcelain — nothing else would have been permitted. My Scottish grandmother used ironstone and transferware, with an early Americana charm entirely her own. Two traditions, each certain of itself. That's still how I work: I don't choose one, I pair a signature white glaze with varied forms and let what's placed on the piece — food, flowers, the people gathered around — supply the color. Giacometti had his objet désagréable, sculpture meant to unsettle the viewer. Mine are the opposite: agreeable objects, made to be used, not to provoke.

I've studied with Bev Prevost, Kate Murphy, Bobby Free, Julia Feld, Sunshine Cobb, Tyler Nansen, and Kayla Stein, among the visiting artists hosted through Sonoma's community ceramics program. My work has been sold through the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art and local wineries, and shown through Arch Contemporary Ceramics in Tiverton, Rhode Island.

These days I walk out to my clay space in the early morning, coffee in hand, to check on a piece slipped and scored the night before. I look up, and it's noon.