About Me

Jake is a potter living in the mountains outside of Helena, Montana with his family. He was born and raised in Helena, and much of the ideas behind his work are influenced by the landscapes of Montana and from growing up in a community that has long supported artist-potters. After pursuing opportunities around the country for the last decade, he moved back to Helena in 2023 to settle down and build a sustainable studio practice.

He studied psychology in school and began pursuing ceramics more intensely after graduating. He has come to realize his interest in both disciplines is rooted in an interest in understanding and connecting with people. Pottery is an incredibly multi-modal medium, encompassing history, sociology, anthropology, physics, chemistry. The potential to interact with all of these different ideas keeps him excited to work with clay.

Jake’s formative education in ceramics came through working at craft schools, community studios, and for other artists, and he received his MFA in Ceramic Art from the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University. He has completed artist residencies at Red Lodge Clay Center, Pottery Northwest, and Studio 740, and is excited to begin a long-term residency at the Archie Bray Foundation in 2025.

About the Work

I make pots. I am intrigued by the ways in which pots communicate human needs and desires across time and cultures, becoming a storytelling device and record keeper. On a personal level, handmade pots offer us meaningful relationships with the objects and rituals of our life, and in turn they help us establish our home space and sense of self. This feels more important now than ever.

Celebrating the immediacy of mark making and touch, I am searching for pots that communicate directly and resonate physically. I am developing a new body of work which explores the intersections of tradition and modernity. Working within a language of North American studio pottery gives me a conceptual framework and provides familiarity and accessibility. Through the comfort of recognizable physical sensibilities, it is my hope to ask questions of form and color - to wonder what stories these pots can tell based on what they have already said.

Fully captivated by the many stages of clay, I strive to be attentive and sensitive to the material and its many processes. Feeling is transmitted and embodied in pots through touch, and so the handling of clay is vitally important. Familiarity and patterns develop through the repetition of touch, which draws me to make work in series. There is a rhythm to working in repetition that creates an infinite amount of potential expression.