Michael Connelly is a potter in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania, as well as Assistant Professor at Montgomery County Community College in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania. In 2010, he founded the Bailey Street Arts Corridor in the Brewerytown neighborhood of Philadelphia.
He received his B.F.A and M.F.A from Alfred University in Alfred, New York. Connelly has taught and presented lectures and workshops at various venues nationally and internationally, including classes at Alfred University, Haystack School for Crafts, Alberta College of Art and Design, Archie Bray Foundation and Penland School of Crafts.
His utilitarian pottery is in the permanent collections of the China Yaoware Museum, the Alfred Ceramic Art Museum, Asheville Art Museum, American Museum of Ceramic Art, Huntington Museum or Ceramic Art and Long Beach Museum of Art.
Jill Allen is a studio artist currently living and working in the Philadelphia, PA area. Her sculptural objects are inspired by the curiosities of “other worlds,” such as the worlds of science fiction, technology, the microcosmos and the human imagination. While clay finds its way into most of her sculptures, Allen will incorporate wire, fabric, and any other material that seems necessary for the work at hand. Allen received a BFA from the University of Illinois, Urbana/Champaign, an MFA from the University of South Carolina, Columbia, and currently teaches ceramics and pottery at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, PA.
Her work is featured in “The Ceramic Glaze Handbook” by Mark Burleson and “Handbuilding” by Shay Amber, and she has exhibited her work at The Museum of Craft and Design in San Francisco, The Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts in ME, The Clay Studio in Philadelphia, and many others. When she is not in the studio or classroom, Allen enjoys traveling, exploring, contemplating, inventing, cultivating, and laughing, all of which inspire her studio practice.
Michael Connelly
I make work that is truthful and shares immediacy. Each pot is completely examined. Each contains a record of its own history as well as tension with past centuries of pottery and an impetus for future iteration.
Jill Allen
While the objects I create are usually inspired by “Other Worlds,” the pieces for this exhibition provided a new and interesting challenge; working collaboratively with another artist (Michael Connelly) whose ideas and methods are quite different from my own. It allowed me to turn my attention to the ideas of home and memory, and to think about how those ideas are so different for each person, even though they are fundamentally important to us all. It was an energizing experience, pushing me outside of my comfort zone to consider how the forms I create might coexist with another person’s ideas, and vice versa.