Alix is a ceramic artist that makes sculptural ceramic vessels that are influenced from the natural landscape. She has studied ceramic traditions in both Turkey, as a Fulbright Scholar, and in Burma with the help of a Graduate Student Fellowship from National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts (NCECA). She lives in Carbondale, CO and teaches at Colorado Mountain College.

By broadening our understanding of the diversity of artisans’ lives, of their techniques and materials, and the delights and challenges that artists around the world experience, we connect more deeply to our larger community of makers. And through this, we understand our smaller community in a different way, and we understand ourselves differently too. By knowing more about the present world, we can more fully understand our history, and it is only from this point of a broadened perspective that we can actively shape our present and our future. 

Within the increasingly connected global world, the story of tradition is usually told under death’s shadow, the eminent demise of tradition obliterated by “modernization”. This is not the story that I aim to share. Rather by sharing these experiences, my hope is that you too have an opportunity to behold the beauty and diversity of contemporary ceramic traditions, as a mirror of the beauty and diversity of the cultures that practice them. With an understanding that these traditions have changed just as much in the past as they will change in the future. 

It is my hope that by broadening our collective understanding of contemporary ceramic traditions we connect more deeply to what it means to be human and to create. 

Beyond the Studio