Carolyn Lewis

My ceramic work begins with childhood experiences of the natural world. Growing up, the forest was both my laboratory and my sanctuary. Walking with my father through damp earth, crunchy leaves, and occasional wildflowers taught me to look closely—to notice sunlight flickering through the canopy, the deeply furrowed surface of bark beneath my fingers, and small forms scattered across the forest floor. These early encounters developed an enduring fascination with texture, irregularity, and the ways nature creates, protects, and transforms.

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That fascination deepened during solitary hikes behind my grandmother’s house, where I explored abandoned coal strippings and searched exposed earth for fossils, unusual stones, and quartz crystals. I was drawn to uncovering something hidden—the trace of ancient life in a fossil, the unexpected pattern within a stone, or the glint of quartz emerging from the dirt. The contrast between living landscape and exposed geology—between growth, erosion, decay, and permanence—continues to inform my approach to clay.

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In the studio, these memories become a point of departure rather than something I reproduce literally. I build intuitively, allowing forms to evolve beneath my hands. Inspired by the ways nature grows, layers, encloses, and reveals, my work may suggest bark, stone, seedpods, shells, roots, fossils, or unfamiliar organisms. Openings reveal interiors, while layered and interwoven elements evoke structures that have grown rather than been constructed. Figurative and creature-like elements emerge alongside abstract forms, resulting in objects that feel simultaneously familiar and mysterious.

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I carve, impress, distort, pierce, and build the clay, leaving traces of my hands on surfaces that appear grown, eroded, fractured, or unearthed. Contrasts between rugged textures and luminous surfaces reflect what has always fascinated me in nature: delicacy beside strength, exposure beside protection, beauty amid decay, and unexpected color emerging from a weathered landscape.

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Each piece becomes its own small world—part artifact, part organism, and part memory. Through clay, I continue the exploration that began in childhood, searching for forms that exist somewhere between the remembered, the natural, and the imagined.