Paul Samuel Briggs was born in Beacon, NY and grew up in the Hudson Valley area of New York state. He was one of those kids who doodled all the time, enrolled in various art classes and began working with clay as a 9th grader. Ceramics quickly became the one place where his attention was not disturbed. His affinity for pinch-forming clay developed while the art director of a summer camp in Bushkill, PA. His thinking about art objects as material shapes with meaning began as an undergraduate at the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University. Over his circuitous life journey Paul has studied and taught education, ceramics, and theology, earning his PhD at the Pennsylvania State University and his MFA at the Massachusetts College of Art, Boston, MA.
Paul works primarily with pinch-forming and slab building processes and overall his work is about art making as inner development, broadly understood. He creates distinctive, high relief pinch-formed ceramic vessels and penetrating slab-built sculptural forms, both genres often have interior space. Paul teaches at Alfred University. He and his partner are making a life, art, ceramics, sewing, quilting, and thinking about how far away their three children live.
Ultimately, I am interested in balance, equanimity and equality. The clay body/hand struggles against being boxed in. The work mediates the mystery of continuation in overwhelming odds. My work primarily raises questions about the possibility of ongoing equanimity in the face of a failing infrastructure and are formally, metaphorically and often literally on the edge. The present does not need to be sought after for it always asserts its fleeting imperceptible hegemonic presence. The effort therefore must be, and is often, toward not being grounded but groundless. I think about my sculpture as icons in the Byzantine sense of carrying information or transporting one to an idea, of representing the intangible and writing with visual information.
Nature makes no aesthetic mistakes,” is a guiding principle of my pinch-formed vessels. For the viewer, the work “looks like leaves,” “tentacles,” “a cobra’s head,” and other organic protuberances and organic patterns, and indeed I have adopted those labels for my repertoire of pinching techniques. In my process and thinking the work has long been about growth as it is a process that keeps me present. I attend to details in the development of high relief surfaces, how the pieces engage with space (think of a fallen conifer cone) and much attention is given to transitions in the texture. I continually reach toward a flow in my practice and of the surface, texture and form inspired by nature. Currently I’m cultivating a black clay aesthetic.