Meredith Host (she/her) produces contemporary tableware and textiles with retro flair. Her dot patterns are inspired by her collection of toilet paper and paper towel designs. She obsesses about these ubiquitous domestic patterns subtly quilted on the paper products we see, use, and throw away every day. Meredith reinterprets these motifs and celebrates them in the context of other domestic objects meant for daily use.  

Meredith received her BFA in Ceramics from Kansas City Art Institute in 2001 and her MFA in Ceramics from The Ohio State University in 2008. She was named one of the 2011 Emerging Artists for NCECA and Ceramics Monthly, and in 2016 was a Presenter at the Utilitarian Clay Symposium. Currently, Meredith lives in Kansas City, MO, teaches workshops around the country, and is a founding member of the Kansas City Urban Potters.

The seeds of inspiration for my current work derive from 17th century Persian miniature paintings and 16th century Dutch still lives. These works display a peculiar balance of deep atmospheric space with an intense attention to minute detail, combinations so resolved that they need for nothing more. In making work, I’m curious about the spaces we inhabit, how we move through our environments, from the lens of domestic objects, architecture, design and daily routine. Familiar objects and their function are examined and reimagined through a loose sense of Scandinavian and mid-century modern sensibility, with a focus on the practical, architectural and essential elements. The results offer the comfort of the familiar with a sense of simplicity, reliability and no-frill timelessness.

Missy McCormick is an artist and art educator, based in Youngstown, OH. After graduating with her BFA in 3D/Ceramics she started her clay career as a production potter in North Georgia’s Appalachian Mountains. Missy received a MFA from the University of Florida and began exhibiting her work and teaching ceramics in a variety of different academic programs across North America. 

After spending over 10 years working solely with soda and wood firing processes, Missy has transitioned her creative research to incorporate atmospheric results at low temperature, fuming terra sigillata surfaces on functional earthenware clay forms. This direction has inspired the use of a new pallet of color, surface, and decorative possibilities. Her inspiration for this shift was spurred by a visit to the Cleveland Museum of Art while teaching a summer course at the Cleveland Institute of Art in 2001, where she stumbled upon a collection of Persian miniature paintings. The intense detailed patterning, subtle value shifts of the backgrounds, and asymmetrical framing of the compositions continue to keep her intrigued.

Missy McCormick has been a resident artist at The International Ceramic Research Center- Guldagergaard in Denmark, Banff Center for the Arts in Alberta Canada, Women Studio Workshop in New York, and has taught ceramics in various positions at the following institutions: Youngstown State University, University of Wisconsin, Madison, University of Arkansas at Little Rock, Florida Atlantic University, Alberta College of Art and Design in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, and Georgia Southern University. Other creative endeavors include starting a community ceramic art studio, Whistle Stop Clay Works, and co-founding the Loveland Farmers’ Market in Loveland, OH.

Alejandro García Contreras’ work is based on a complex imagery, where Chiapas artisanal production, colonial art, cartoons and pop comics, folklore, mythology and his personal history come together. Just as the creative resources are diverse, so is the materiality of his projects, as they fuse ceramics, graphics, painting and other artistic resources. This combination of elements results in suggestive forms in which the viewer can explore the divine and the evil, the magical, the erotic, the feminine and various taboo dimensions from his or her own unconscious, thus discovering a new sense of divinity through contemporary idols.

Garcia Contreras studied Visual Arts at the National School of Painting, Sculpture and engraving ENPEG / La Esmeralda. In 2016 he was invited to the Casa Wabi residency program the same year he started the art residency “Dedazo” in Carrillo Puerto, Chiapas. In the last few years, his work has received worldwide feedback and has exhibited with various Japanese, European, Mexican, and U.S based galleries.

My work comes into being through a great deal of non-linear or associative research, tangential explorations and an abiding love of the object, the well made, properly made, appropriate object. Just as much it is informed by a childhood spent exploring the cramped, overstuffed homes of elderly midwestern relatives, filled with books, curios and artifacts from their long lives. While my work may have a familiarity in expression or form, there is a half-cocked dream logic to the entirety. I am returning to these spaces in my dreams to interrogate these objects for their stories. Borrowing my subjects as I do from existing sources, I need to gain as much ownership of the work as I can. This manifests itself in my laboring over these projects, beginning to end, in every aspect. Every decision of refinement or finish, material choice, action or inaction belongs to me. In this Whitmanesque spirit, ‘out of the cradle endlessly rocked’ by a craft based work ethic, I feel the need to come to my finished product honestly, through the work of my own hand.

Ryan W. Kelly is an Associate Professor in WWU’s Art & Art History Department, teaching Ceramics and 3-D Foundations. Prior to that he lived and worked in Philadelphia, where he was a resident artist at The Clay Studio; a recipient of an Independence Foundation Fellowship, and a co-curator at Practice Gallery. His collaborations in dance and theater include credits in the Green Porno series by Isabella Rossellini.