Gayzies Garden
September 2026

Gayzies Garden

September 2026

Gayzies Garden transforms a 150-year-old greenhouse into a ceramic woodland that celebrates life.

As a child, I often found myself in a state of reverie in and of nature’s world. We made little fairy villages behind our camp house. I played in the mud underneath old oak trees. I have always been inspired by our ability to imagine the world differently. Gayzies Garden is my effort to ask: how can we transform the world we live in to allow restoration and healing to take place?

The concept for a ceramic woodland world first revealed itself to me in 2024 through a series of waking dreams. Wondering how to begin such an ambitious, long-term project, I took the first step by creating a ceramic tree and fountain, first sketched in March 2025. Now, a year and a half after those initial sketches, the woodland continues to flourish. Thousands of handmade leaves, countless curious critters, and a growing forest of ceramic trees have gradually brought this dreamlike world to life.

While this project is rooted in imagination and creativity, my practice requires equal attention to the practical question of how. How do I build a tree? How do I create textures and colors that echo the moss growing on the trees outside my studio?

The technical and logistical challenges of creating this installation are constant, and they deeply shape the work itself. Each solution opens the door to new possibilities while imposing its own limitations. In this way, the process mirrors the life of a tree: shaped by the practical realities of existence. How does a tree grow? How does it adapt? How does it live in relationship with the forest around it? These questions of making, growing, and belonging lie at the heart of both the woodland I create and the woodland that inspires it. Gayzies Garden is an effort to show that we can reimagine this world and honor it for its great beauty and care.

In Memory of my mother

Mary Gay Townsend

In the Garden.

Spring 2026

Spring 2025

2024

Welcome.
2024 has been a year of settling and establishing. It's been a continuation of the exploration of who I want to be as an artist and crafts person.

It is November 2024 and the year is nearly over. In retrospect this has been a year of focusing on what really matters to me; of learning how to say no to something that does not serve my greater vision; and of taking the foundation of what I have built over the last two years and saying this is what I want to do now.

I want to build a forest. so I'm starting with the leaves and the flowers.

there many things I have not caught on camera as my focus has been making and build a collection.

My working is getting bigger and I think towards 2025 and dream of bigger kilns and elaborate works of clay.

Thanks for coming along.
See you in the studio!

In the Green House
Fall 2023

Spring 2023 Greenhouse Gallery

Fall 2022
in the Studio

In my exploration of clay, glaze and fire, I seek to understand myself and the contradiction within me, how I move, how I make, and how I engage with the world. As a nonbinary artist, I am drawn to ceramics, a fragile yet strong material, something that can last for centuries or broken at birth; it's soft and malleable until it's transformed into something hard and solid.

bent bodies

Tall Medium distorted vase- Malten blue, red 01 -02_edited.jpg

Artist Statement

Fall/Winter 2021

Clay is alive. It moves to my touch; it dances a sweet song that can be heard and felt. It is my mission to learn to listen to the breath of the cool mud that ripples through my hands and to uncover the secrets of the body that is pulled through my fingers. Glaze runs and dips, finding the crevasses the clay has left behind, dressing the naked figures so they may be presented and owned.

It is in this clay that I find a voice of the bent figures-the peculiar ones that the queer people know and love. These vessels are different than the forms that decorate the traditional.

I guess it is in these forms that I claim my uniqueness. It is a reaching to claim my right to queer, to claim a different character than I am expected to be. Yet, I seek an invisibility in this. I am not forthright with every stranger, friend, or family member, I let them see me as they wish, quietly hoping they will notice. In these bent bodies that I play with the spectrum of traditional and abstract, quietly building the clay walls till I find myself as whom I wish to be, no permission or blessing outside of my fingers and the restrain of this craft. In every vase I make, may spirit run and sit quietly on someone’s shelf waiting to be seen in a whole new light.

is that a sea creature???

Is that a Sea Creature???

Artist Statement

Spring 2021

The ocean wave breaks along the shore – a contrast of land and water, a borderland separating two different worlds while creating a world of its own. My work plays with the binaries of coastlines, the full color of shimmering glaze to the smoothed surface of finely polished clay, the morphing of ideas of gender and mixed genitalia, an adoration and disregard of utilitarianism, the exploration of craft and art. I do not exist as a man or a woman. I am too masculine in feature to be feminine, yet my heart aches as I am defined as such in the eyes of others. I know I am something else. My quest in this work is to hold those gender ideals together and discover a sense of wholeness – as though I am reconfiguring understandings, coming to new intersections of identity and breaking them. It is in my ceramics that I explore this question and become something outside of this body.

I explore binaries through combining sculpture, tadelakting, high grit sanding, punching, hitting, drying, wetting, glazing, drilling, cutting, firing and throwing clay in unique configurations. A swarm of genitals reach out from the depths. A crack in the ceramic form reveals what was thought to be hidden within the porcelain walls. A worm protrudes from the peddles of a coral form. These sea creatures of genital clams and worms are a dark study of gender and utility, marrying the smooth form of thrown pot and raw clay sculpting.

The pursuit of making larger and more intricate pieces is at the core of developing my artistic vision- to be seen and yet have space for details to be hidden, playing with the ideas of craving visibility and acceptance while fearing and needing a place to hide and become invisible to become small.