“I view experimentation and risk as a prerequisite to making anything meaningful. I have to discover something new each time, if I’m really making art. I learned how improvisation can be a route to revelation, to discovery. And when something is discovered while it’s being made, it can always stay new.”
Andrew Jowdy Collins (b. 1977) combines iconic form with a revisionist approach to color theory to create bold porcelain vessels and wall works. Collins has obtained an MFA in Poetry from University of California, Irvine, as well as a BA in English from Appalachian State University. He has exhibited across the United States, including at Grohmann Museum, Plinth Gallery, and Nemacolin. He has created artwork for Fallingwater, Hampton Designer Showhouse, The Grand Tour, and has had work featured in American Art Collector and Table Magazine, among others. He lives and works in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
“During my first potting apprenticeship, I had to make 200 tea bowls (chawan) a day, and my teacher would keep two or three, only the ones with the right energy. It was always the few bowls where I just lost myself in their making. In a quite material way my work reflects risk as well. I create original palettes of pigmented porcelain, one of the most demanding materials – cutting and arranging individual pieces into a cogent whole vessel or panel. The process is demanding, requiring a great deal of planning and improvisation to stay on the clay’s good side.
“One simple way I use to describe how I make my work is: The decoration you see is the construction of the piece. The colours of my work are not painted on; they are each an individual piece of pigmented porcelain that I make, shape, and adhere together, like a puzzle of sorts.
“The foundation of my artistic work began in my family’s commercial refrigeration workshop in rural southern United States, learning how to design and construct cooling systems with welding and woodwork. This taught me a technical patience and precision that my making processes have embodied ever since, as I view the act of designing/making as a meditation that cultivates a particular flavour of creative attention, where questions and concepts interact with the material
world. My artwork often deals with ethical questions regarding how I navigate issues of belonging and marginalisation, and concepts of necessity and luxury. My compositions and forms navigate interior/exterior spaces, and are figurative/abstract balancing acts concerning form, space, and light. I also operate a functional ceramics studio, JOWDY, making limited editions of pieces for interiors and homes.”
