Portrait of the Artist as an overworked young man.
Matt Becker is a ceramicist and illustrator who enjoys color, gestural form, and when his glaze firings behave themselves.
Matt graduated in 2021 with his MFA in Ceramics from the Rhode Island School of Design where he investigating the meeting point between his ceramic, illustrative, and Storytelling practices. Alongside of his experiments in clay, Matt teaches pottery classes at Mill Court Ceramics, a local pottery studio in Storrs, CT, where he encourages his students to experiment with glaze and is always ready to gently coach someone who is having trouble centering.
Matt has been vending at various fine art and craft fairs for nearly a decade, and enjoys interacting face-to-face with customers who purchase his work. He hopes to continue sculpting, throwing, and illustrating as long as his wrists and lower back hold out! (Updated 8/2023)
How do we find a space for ourselves in a world driven by algorithmic creation that craves flawless beauty? What does it say about humans that the more we can control the fewer flaws we allow?
Clay offers a mutability and tactility that I exploit to inject friction into real world spaces by embracing the volatile, the vibrant, and the visually delicious.
I like to think of the construction process as investigative play: What texture will this tool make? How will it warp? How will these colors or glazes interact? The time fractured nature of ceramics gives these pieces an experimental, vulnerable quality that forces an acceptance of the imperfect and the unexpected.
My hope is that by creating work that is a little chaotic, a little playful, and very human that viewers can see an imperfect, flawed being from the outside and recognize that, just like them, it's valuable and interesting just as it is.
