Brooks Oliver is an Assistant Professor and Program Coordinator of Ceramics at the University of North Texas and a studio artist based out of Denton, Texas. He recently completed a long-term residency at the Archie Bray Foundation in Helena, Montana. He received his MFA from The Pennsylvania State University, his BFA at Southern Methodist University, and completed his post baccalaureate studies at Syracuse University. He has taught in Jindezhen, China in 2016 with West Virginia University and regularly teaches workshops in and out of university settings, including Haystack Mountain School of Crafts and the Anderson Ranch. In 2017 he was named an Emerging Artist by the National Council on Educations in the Ceramic Arts. He actively exhibits work and has recently been included in exhibitions at the San Angleo Museum of Art, Ceramics Park Mino Museum, the Dallas Museum of Art, UIlrich Museum of Art, the LacosteKean Gallery, Northern Clay Center, The Archie Bray Foundation, the Artstream Nomadic Gallery, the Dallas Pottery Invitational, the Penland Gallery, Belger Crane Yard, and Western Carolina University Fine Art Museum.
The ambition of my work is to reimagine and reinterpret the familiar functional vessel. By isolating, altering, and exploiting the necessary components of a vessel, I attempt to provide new visions of utilitarian ceramic wares.
My work inherently blurs the boundaries between craft, design, industry, and technology as I am inspired by the charged grey areas between these binaries. By marrying the production techniques of CAD software and rapid prototyping technologies with the creation techniques of the hand, a unique dialog can be formed between the digital and clay that ultimately influences both ways of making.