Portfolio Review: Ceramic Artist Michelle Erickson Shares The Stories Behind Her Favorite Works

Do not underestimate the ceramic work of Michelle Erickson, both in its technical construction and its conceptual meaning. Having completed a three-month artist residency at The Victoria and Albert Museum and done multiple projects for Nike, she's made her work known beyond the very personal and researched place it comes from. Her pieces tell historical stories about social, political, and environmental issues that are timeless, commenting on the human spirit and documenting it all on her blog. The stories behind the stories are just as exciting, we promise.

Portfolio Review: Ceramic Artist Michelle Erickson Shares The Stories Behind Her Favorite Works

"These skulls are made from various clays I got off a construction site in East London."

Photo Credit: Robert Hunter

"I began a project experimenting with 21st century pattern designs using Nike Olympic trainers as my resource, here I’m applying the relief from the soles of the shoes as intertwined Olympic rings on a pot inspired by a 13th century London Jug (also in my case)."

Photo Credit: Robert Hunter

"My studio cases in the Victoria and Albert Museum during my artist in residence 2012 had Olympic trainers courtesy of Nike 2012 Track and Field Innovation along with my test porcelains, 18th century sauceboat molds and other fantastic objects from the V&A collection."

Photo Credit: Robert Hunter

"A cobbled together cartoon teapot has the feel of an object that cannot wait to be made. There is an urgency about this situation: a response is required, right now.”
-Excerpt from Edmund DeWaahl’s The Pot Book

Photo Credit: Gavin Ashworth NY

"Shell Pickle visits a superstar of American decorative arts -the pickle stands made by the first American Porcelain Factory operating in Philadelphia at the onset of the American Revolution. My recreation of this work incorporates artifacts of 21st century fossil fuel warfare i.e. American ‘Dependence’."

New Blue and White MFA Boston
Ferrin Gallery
Photo Credit: Gavin Ashworth NY

"Paradise Lost was created in 2008 as a response to America’s military policies in the Middle East. Inspired by famed 16th century French potter Bernard Palissy’s ‘Fecundity Dishes’ once fertile a war weary Liberty reclines in an impoverished scene marking the real cost of war- human life."

Photo Credit: Gavin Ashworth NY

"Weapon of Choice makes a statement on man’s reliance on natural resources. A porcelain gas pump pierces a skull painted with the imperial style ‘dragon chasing the pearl’. Indigenous clay brick impressed with fossilized shell supports the conceptual ‘weapon.'"

Cincinnati Art Museum
Photo Credit: Robert Hunter

"Octopus Junk is from a series on Chinese Junk shipwreck artifacts objects lost in time that re-emerge as a new genus. I later ran across an article where an octopus who had clung to a porcelain dish was pulled up by fisherman and led to the discovery of a major shipwreck. Crazy."

Victoria & Albert Museum
Photo Credit: Gavin Ashworth NY

"Timepeace is 21st century abolitionist protest on child soldiering and slavery. I recreated this creamware jug referencing a typical export of 18th century Liverpool a major slave port accounting for over a million Africans carried across the Atlantic by British slavers."

MOCK/BITE Southwest School of Art
Photo Credit: Gavin Ashworth NY

"Potters Field is the first work in a series on life cycles of form and function fashion and design the history of ceramics- the history of us. I use the Staffordshire tradition of reverse slip to create a free trailed skeletal figure in negative and positive."

Photo Credit: Gavin Ashworth NY

"Made in China plays off the history of the importing of Chinese porcelain using the 18th century Blanc de Chine figure of Quanyin as a springboard to make a statement about ‘china trade’ in the 21st century."

Carnegie Museum of Art
Photo Credit: Gavin Ashworth NY

"Liberty- 2001 is one of three works I created in response to 9/11."

Private Collection
Photo Credit: Gavin Ashworth NY

"Fossil Teapot is an object for a 21st century Wunderkammer, a contemplation on our temporal existence and the potential role we may play in our own extinction."

Virginia Museum Fine Arts
Photo Credit: Gavin Ashworth NY

"Virginia reflects on timeless issues of invasion, colonialism, and cultural conflict. A Native American King marked with union jack war paint and tattooed with symbols of British imperialism. His headdress of pomegranates, symbolizing the forbidden fruit, suggests the last moments of ‘paradise’ unspoiled."

Chipstone Foundation, Milwaukee Art Museum
Photo Credit: Gavin Ashworth NY

"Green-aid Squirrel, AKA Boom Boom, references historical bottles made in early 19th century North Carolina. The unusual green glaze on the early American made animal bottles inspired me to begin producing my own green army. The life cast grenade gives the upper hand to this environmental warrior."

Chipstone Foundation Milwaukee Art Museum
Photo Credit: Gavin Ashworth NY