Artist Statement
Curvilinear, soft, and voluminous, my pots have an expansive feeling that connotes growth, abundance, and generosity. Vessels are divided symmetrically using embossed lines as a means of projecting order onto their forms and enhancing their volume and curvature. This evokes the structured, recurring, and purposeful aspect of nature. I look to the experience of vitality and beauty that nature provides and translate these qualities into something tangible, useful, and nourishing in the form of functional ceramics.
By reinforcing and reflecting formal relationships throughout my vessels, I create unified, harmonious designs in which every element is considered and purposeful. Surfaces are employed to encourage and reward tactile interaction and which enhance formal decisions. It is my hope that the care of their making may translate to their user, and that this visual language may enhance the sensual experience through use.
As a potter, utility is among my primary concerns. Far from a hindrance, utility opens up new lanes of creative expression and engagement. Pots are not a mere reflection of life, but a participant in it. They invite you into the experience and are incomplete absent your participation. I believe that in this capacity, as a thing that is a part of life, that something as mundane as a cup can act as both a conduit of culture and community and as an object of aesthetic and intellectual contemplation. Pots are tools set in service of a greater whole. Much of their content, the way we perceive and understand them, comes from their relationship to us and to our needs. Covered jars speak to preservation, separation, commemoration, even mourning; teapots, pitchers, and serving bowls become icons of community, speaking to ideas related to gathering, sharing, and generosity. In this way, these vessels speak to fundamental realities of what it is to be human.
Chance Taylor, December 2025
Teaching Philosophy
I have a passion for both making and teaching, and find both elements of my practice to be deeply fulfilling. I am proud of the work that my students have done, and hope to continue to share what I know with new generations of artists, craftspeople, and thinkers.
​
I subscribe to a Constructivist teaching philosophy in which students are active participants in their education. It is my goal to provide a firm basis of technical and theoretical knowledge that students can build off of to pursue their own goals and interests. This requires the removal of hurdles that hinder students from realizing their creative ambitions: to get them beyond the stage where they are asking “how?’ so they can explore the larger questions of "why?" and "towards what end?”. I aim to model a well rounded creative practice to my students by actively working alongside them in the classroom, discussing new ideas I am grappling with or find interesting, and inviting them to participate in firings, discussions, equipment maintenance, or tea time in the studio. My mentors and teachers have shown a tremendous generosity with their time and willingness to share what they know. I try to keep that tradition alive in the classroom.
​
It is important that students are able to contextualize their work within a larger cosmos of influences and ideas. This begins with a familiarity with history, seeing how artists and craftspeople respond to changes in culture, technology, and thought to create works which speak to their experience in their own time. I reinforce this historical understanding through the introduction of a variety of theoretical frameworks which can be applied to a wide range of creative pursuits. I use Gaston Bachelard’s phenomenology as an introduction to the poetics of the every day, Villem Flusser's theory of Gestures to explore how our actions have symbolic weight that communicates our values, and an investigation of the power of domestic objects rooted in Thing Theory, Social History, and the philosophy of Soetsu Yanagi. In short, I try to take students through the problems I deal with in my own practice and the ideas that have helped me confront them.
​
My assignments are varied. Early assignments are focused on technical goals: developing proficiency on the wheel, learning a variety of surface decorating techniques, making objects that are formally and conceptually related. As these skills are developed the assignments ask more of students, asking them to make objects that speak to who they are and what they value. In “Holding History, Honoring Memory” students are asked to design a set of dishes for presenting and serving a family recipe. The research component of the project asks students to do a deep investigation of a family recipe, exploring its origins, the memories it is tied to, and what it means to them and their families. These recipes and stories are then compiled into a cookbook that doubles as a collective and personal history. During critique, students present their dish in the vessels they made and share their stories with the class. What better way to bring a group of people together than over a shared meal?
Skills are developed both through assignments and participation in the running and operation of the studio. Students are expected to approach their practice holistically, participating and making decisions in every aspect of their work. They are involved in making clay, mixing glazes, firing kilns, and the maintenance of shared spaces – all of the technical work that becomes the scaffolding of their practice. I believe that this collaborative, participatory approach is beneficial to students as they are exposed to a diverse set of situations that offer learning and teaching opportunities, and to the studio, because this group dynamic allows us to achieve more together. A successful woodfiring, for example, is not possible without this sort of dynamic. My goal is to cultivate students I would be happy to work alongside.
Chance Taylor, December 2025
Florescence: the Gesture of Tending a Garden
The following is an edited transcript of a talk given at Western New Mexico State University.
To cultivate any skill requires sustained engagement and dedicated work. This body of work came about slowly over the course of years. Any success that you see was built on a foundation of thousands of pots that came before them. My practice is a continuous process of refinement.
​
When you start out as a maker, it is like walking into a fresh tilled field. There is nothing but potential. There is a long period of exploration, of trial and error, trying to find anything that will work and taking pleasure in every small victory. Eventually though, you learn what works, what does not, and more importantly what enriches and sustains you. Then the challenge shifts, at some point you have the skills and the knowledge to make whatever you like, then comes the harder task of finding something meaningful to pursue.
​
When I was working towards my undergraduate degree, I heard an analogy for different types of creatives. The analogy presented three creative archetypes: Gardeners, Gatherers, and Architects, using them to illuminate a few notable tendencies in creative thought and practice. Though this was only a brief aside, it has stuck with me and I have been thinking about these archetypes and my relationship to them ever since. This has been a way for me to come to terms with my own practice, and a way for me to find a way of working that is both meaningful and generative. I want to take a few minutes now to discuss my understanding of these tendencies, and my relationship to them.
​
A Gardener stakes out a plot of land, plants their seeds, and tends to them. They find fertile ground and they develop it, coming to know it and its potential over time. The fruits of their labor grow from the creative act. For the Gardener, the act of creation is a collaborative gesture, working with, rather than subordinating. This method allows space for both intention and emergence.
​
Gatherers move from place to place, taking something from here, something from there. At first, Their process seems unstructured, taking what they like from where they like. For them, consistency is not a virtue. However, over time, patterns begin to emerge. The Gatherer learns where to look and what to look for; they become more adept at identifying and incorporating those things that resonate with them. Through this process, their work becomes more reflective of their sensibilities as their intuitions are developed and refined. The gesture of gathering is characterized by openness and perception.
​
Architects are planners; the path forward must be charted before the journey begins. They carefully develop a vision, and their work is to faithfully bring that vision into being. Form, material, and labor are all selected, molded, and directed in service of a known end. Their work is judged based on its adherence to the Architects vision. The gesture of the architect is deliberate and instrumental.
​
As an artist you must move between these modes of working and thinking. When I need inspiration or find myself stagnating, I become a gatherer. When I am deep in a making cycle and new ideas seem to emerge and grow from one another, I am a gardener. When I plan and install a show, I step into the shoes of the Architect; arranging and ordering parts into a cohesive whole.
​
Where I find myself most at home is in the studio, seeing my work evolve and grow alongside me. I think this is why the act of tending a Garden has always seemed like an appropriate metaphor for my creative practice. My first serious artist statement was a poem about labor and its rewards:
​
You work, toiling away in the dirt and, eventually, you are rewarded for your efforts. You have created something of the earth to which you have a deep connection. It is the fruit of your labor and from the knowledge of this you attain a profound sense of satisfaction, knowing you have made something tangible, useful, and nourishing.
Now rest and begin again.
​
I want to take some time now to revisit and unpack the intuitions that led me to write that poem. The metaphor seems to have grown more resonant over time, I hope it may be useful to you as it has been to me.
​
A garden is more than a garden.
​
A garden is a species of technology; it is the cultivation of land and the growing of crops, but through the gardener it becomes much more. A garden can be tended beautifully, arranged beautifully, set to rest beautifully. A Gardener may make an art of the canning of tomatoes or the burning of their fields. A garden is by its nature a thing that reaches beyond its purpose. Though it may serve that purpose well, it is not subservient to it, it is more than a means to an end.
​
A garden nourishes. It requires that you invest yourself in it and rewards you in turn. Tending a garden may seem like an archaic gesture, rendered obsolete by the advancement of technology and the economies of scale which are integral to modern production. Yet the gesture remains, and those who practice it find meaning within its inefficiencies. There is pleasure in the tilling of the soil, anticipation in the sowing of the seeds, pride in the labor of cultivation. For the Gardener this connection to soil and to seed, the time, care, and labor that went into a harvest, invests the fruits of that labor with special significance. It is a sort of value that is difficult to quantify. One based in a logic aimed towards quality of experience rather than efficiency or productivity.
​
A garden demands attention, and its needs shift as the season progresses. A gardener must have a variety of skills to fulfill these needs. Tilling the soil, sowing the seeds, placing peas and beans in the shade and tomatoes in the sun – each thing in its time and place so that they may thrive. For the gardener this is a collaborative gesture, working with the land, guiding and nurturing the things being grown.
A garden is directed towards fulfilling our needs. These needs may be practical, as in food, commerce, or research; or they may be directed towards another set of needs. A flower garden defies most of the already archaic practical potential of the garden, yet its products nourish all the same, fulfilling psychological, aesthetic, or emotional needs. For the Gardener, tending their garden may be an end in itself, but that is a solipsistic meaning; the true beauty of the garden is realized when the efforts of the gardener are directed towards the needs of those around them.
​
A gardener must take up a variety of roles. Just as there is meaning to be had in the tending of the garden, so too is there pleasure in preparing, preserving, and presenting the product of that labor. Some gardeners take pleasure in canning their vegetables for the winter, others find joy in the precise arrangement of their flowers within the home, and some take satisfaction in the delicate relationship of their garden and the bees – the particular way that they sustain one another and, by extension, us. The Gardener sustains their garden, and in turn the garden sustains them.
​
A garden is a confluence of nature and human design. Here, two radically opposed forces come together creating something harmonious and distinct. I am fascinated by areas like this where two seemingly opposing forces meet and rather than clashing, compliment each other. The painter Robert Henri once said that a curve does not exist in its full power until it is contrasted by a straight line. This simple principle has guided my work and my thinking. The aspect of nature I aim to capture is not wild and untamed, but directed and purposeful. The Garden, for me, is the confluence of Man and Nature. It represents intention and emergence, intuition and analysis: two aspects of our being in harmony. A place where Ideas grow and are cut away until they take a shape that shows their meaning.
​
Chance Taylor, 2024