Jake Brodsky

Jake was born and raised in Helena, Montana where he spent much of his childhood exploring the outdoors. While studying psychology and neuroscience at Colorado College he often found himself in the school’s ceramic studio, and after graduating he decided to fully pursue ceramics. He spent time at Arrowmont School of Crafts and Penland School of Crafts as a work-study student, immersing himself in workshops before focusing his studio practice on wood and soda fired pots. He returned to Montana in 2016 to be closer to family and was quickly pulled into the clay community of Helena.”I make pots. I enjoy asking nuanced questions of form as well as big-picture questions of what pots do in our world, but it is the latter which has guided my research this year. My work is rooted in ideas of life, death, and transformation. Ceramics is a time-based medium, and I have been exploring the concept of time in different formats in my work: repetition as a marker of time, time in the context of funerary vessels, the time of visible transformation and melting that happens in the kiln, and time expressed through the drying of wet clay. Things happen linearly in the transformation of clay to ceramic, but from my perspective as a maker, this linear progression, repeated many times, becomes cyclical. There is a rhythm to working in repetition that creates an infinite amount of potential expression.”