Jan Richardson began creating ceramics in 1960, but her love of craft goes back to a young childhood surrounded by creative women. From her roots in fine craft to her current extraterrestrial-inspired abstract wall pieces, Jan’s art spans genres and generations. Her curiosity and career in clay have led her across the globe. From her childhood in Long Island to her first clay class in Santa Barbara and to this day, Jan’s need to create sustains her.
Her first business was making and selling hand-crafted clothing. After settling in Knoxville, Maryland, Jan was the proprietor, head artist, and designer for Windy Meadows for thirty years. She and her crew of local artists recreated their rural Maryland architecture in handmade ceramic miniature to critical acclaim. From Maryland, Jan moved to St. Petersburg, where she closed the Windy Meadows line and returned to independent creating.
Not content to remain a solely practicing artist, Jan has also been a teacher, member, and promoter of her local ceramics communities throughout her sixty year career. Jan is currently teaching at the Morean Center for Clay in St. Petersburg, Florida and at the Safety Harbor Art and Music Center in Safety Harbor, Florida.
In her current body of work, her early love of indigenous art and geometric pattern have culminated in a collection of vessels designed to honor and echo that ethos. She asks us to look at the commonalities of pattern and design between ancient cultures and to consider what it was that they were communicating. Jan’s newest works are no longer simply functional objects, but vessels to carry the imagination to the farthest reaches of the universe.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Art, even ceramic art, is driven by the desire to communicate. This idea and the evidence of it throughout the art of ancient civilizations fascinates me. From my roots in New England to Santa Barbara to La Meridiana to the basement of the Natural History Museum in Beijing, I find inspiration in the places where utility meets humanity. My deepest gladness is met in the human desire to connect through the language of pattern and symbol. This body of work is an effort to draw together the earliest urges of human communication and to connect with my audience through them.
My ceramic work is created very much as such work has always come into being. From a rough sketch to a template to assembly and alteration, I use techniques and materials that have always existed among ceramic creators. Decoration is spontaneous, a visual language of my own that reflects the geometric patterning and repetition of so many aboriginal cultures impressed into the soft clay. Mixed media, patinated wire and found objects, are attached both before and after firing. Refined earth elements and glazes are applied, and the object is subjected to the fire.
My most recent work, the Intergalactic Series, seeks to tie together our ancient past, a disposable present, and a future of expansion and hope. By bringing together organic form and ancient decoration with extraterrestrial motifs, my hope is to inspire and intrigue my audience with the universal connections between cultures past and future, between Terra and the beyond.