Hello party people! My name is Jacquie, and I’m a feisty Italian from Bloomfield, New Jersey. Art (or more specifically, engaging in messy creative endeavors) has always been an integral part of my journey through life. I’ve always to been drawn to building, customizing, and making things, from creating peculiar objects d’art from the scrap wood my dad kept in the garage to building a mini-fabric store in the basement out of cardboard boxes and scraps of fabric my mom kept. I stayed on my personal and nutty little art train through middle school, took a paper mâché monster-building class in high school, and the next thing I knew I was switching my major at the University of Northern Colorado from Music Education to Art Education…which turned out to the one of the best decisions I ever made. I finally got a space in Intro to Wheel Throwing with Jane Dillon…and then spent lots of late nights in the studio crying over my wheel, struggling, swearing, carving, screwing up, and creating. I stuck with it, and the more I learned, the more I wanted to know. Seventeen years later, I have a full-blown pottery addiction.
More often than not I prefer wheel-throwing to hand-building, but I gravitate back to sculpting and mold-making around August and September so add to my still-growing (and nowhere near complete) collection of Halloween decorations, masks, prosthetics, and costumes. I love to talk about creepy and gross things with anyone who seems mildly interested, but I also have a penchant for stupid jokes and making analogies to food.
Within the realm of clay, I gravitate towards mugs, jars, and bowls. My latest focus has been hovering between trying different clay bodies, agateware, underglaze transfers, and glaze layering with different fluxes. I’ve been dwelling in the land cone 6 oxidation, but I’ve been intrigued by cone 10 reduction since college and can’t wait to learn all about it!