Emily grew up in Minnesota, where she was strongly inspired by Japanese mingei traditions, while also being influenced by her mother’s upbringing in a Mennonite community. Presently, she is using the history and language of historical vessels to help understand her environment both in a physical and transcendental context.
An artist and Associate Professor, Adjunct at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Emily received her BFA from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities and her MFA from the University of Colorado, Boulder. She has exhibited her work at the Dubai Design Fair in the UAE, the Kansas City Museum in Missouri, the Ohio Craft Museum in Wooster, Oliva Gallery in Chicago, and many others. She is the recipient of a Jerome Fellowship from the Northern Clay Center and the Sage Fellowship from the Archie Bray Foundation. She has been an artist-in-residence at the Archie Bray Foundation, the Zentrum für Keramik in Berlin, Germany, the Alberta University of the Arts in Canada and Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts in Maine.
My work is both artifice and authentic, a collection of my realized environment as well as the utopian garden in my mind. My vessels operate as a miniature grotto: a fabricated garden where both real and imagined environments coexist, embodying both decay and growth, reality and mortality. By gathering up the dust and debris of my life, these objects hold the complexities of my world. Each vessel is a visual diary of my daily existence. The grotesque and sublime mix – it is my world.
I think of my own history as a material, as earth, as dust. I take older work, grind it into coarse grog, and apply it to the surface of my work. By thinking of myself as material, my vessels carry my past along; continuing to shape the present.