New Ceramics

Julie Clements

About The Artist

Julie Clements is an artist working out of her home studio “Clay Pigeon Ceramics” in northern California. Julie began exploring clay art and sculpture during her undergraduate study at Emory University. Post-graduation she continued learning and developing during a year-long internship at Callanwolde Fine Art Center in Atlanta, Georgia. Current themes in her  work include explorations into animals, ecology, and science. Julie has also worked as a veterinary technician in zoo’s and small animal medicine for fifteen years. As a tech she continually renews her interest in the animal world.  Julie hopes to convey this in her art and her intense interest in animals in all their unique forms. She finds nature endlessly inspiring and maybe you will too when you see her sculptures.

Jeff Nebeker

About The Artist

Jeff Nebeker was one of the first Funk ceramic artists to perfect the use of pastry tools in clay sculpture. Finding the formula to adhere the wet clay squeezed from pastry tools onto the sculptural, hand built clay body of his form, and an interest in food subjects from 1970’s Pop Art, has led him to produce an amazing array of life-like cakes, confections and portraits of artists as pastry chefs and apprentices.

Nebeker is both an accomplished ceramist and pastry chef. He draws visual parallels between frosting, decorating and baking a cake to hand building, glazing and firing a clay piece, as far as patience, creativity, and technical skill are involved. His work acknowledges the fine art involved with being a professional pastry chef and cake decorator, as well as reference Pop Artists, Claes Oldenburg and Wayne Thiebaud, among others. His figurative works are ceramic.

Karen Shapiro

About The Artist

My first recorded attempts at artistic expression were at the ripe age of 5 years or so when I painstakingly painted the adobe brick walls surrounding our house in Tucson. The records of these attempts are the scratchy old home movies taken years ago — the painted images being executed in nothing but tap water and disappearing instantly in the Arizona sun. Years later I majored in art in high school where I began working in clay and continued in this medium as a design major in college. After college and continuing until a year or so ago, my medium changed drastically to a more edible art form in the shape of a long, hard career as a pastry chef.

I am now happily out of the kitchen and back into the ceramics studio where I am finding great joy in working in a sculpture style which is new for me. In earlier years, my emphasis was on abstract form — believing, of course, that I was redefining the perfect form. Upon reentering the ceramic studio at the College of Marin, under the tutelage of the ever-inspiring energy and talent of Anne Peet Carrington, I naturally tried to take up where I had left off many years ago. I was immediately frustrated and disappointed to see that those “perfect” forms would no longer come from my hands. Instead, I was drawn to the form of a milk carton, then to my espresso pot from Italy, next to an artichoke from the market — in other words, I found an inexhaustible source of fascinating shapes and forms staring at me from all sides.

Now I find myself jumping around from vegetables to nail polish bottles and lipsticks, to crayons and on and on … and in addition to these wonderful objects I have also discovered the raku kiln. The excitement of reaching into a red-hot environment with tongs, of the flaming bucket, even the choking smoke, and finding results I never dreamt of — always changing, always so much to learn — has given me back an enormous energy, appetite and passion for my work. It’s an adventure I’ve just begun, and I look forward to many fulfilling years and ever more exciting results which I hope to share with as many people as may also find them interesting and fun.