Mark Johnson
It is my goal to make pottery relevant to our time, and to give it a meaningful place in our culture.
Ceramics Professor Mark Johnson is featured in the May/June issue of Pottery Making Illustrated magazine. The article is entitled "Compose and Contain: Flower Rafts," which features the step-by-step process of making and glazing his work.
Learn more and buy the issue here.
About his work, he says, "Curiosity about the visual world and the desire to create meaning and give order to experience has fueled my interest in art making. As I reflect on some of my earliest experiences in studio art, the transformational aspect of art making stands out as one of the key considerations. To begin with an observation and translate it into a drawing, to use a viewfinder to crop the world into a photograph, to mold clay into a vessel or a sculpture, all of these actions involve an exhilarating process of transformation."
"It is my goal to make pottery relevant to our time, and to give it a meaningful place in our culture. It is my desire to restate the value of the handmade object and to see this object as a metaphor for the importance of the individual and the value of shared human experience. This effort forms a bridge between the traditions of the past and concerns of the present to create a springboard for future work. Each piece offers the opportunity to improvise and to discover new relationships. A successful piece of pottery reveals itself over time to be a blend of visual, tactile, and conceptual messages. Living with pottery, we learn something about the pottery maker and ourselves. We share the pathways of touch, and through repeated use, we add vitality to our daily activities. In this way pottery is about communication and a celebration of the essential things that make us human."