Frequently moving around the country throughout childhood, I developed a deep sentimental attachment to the living spaces and things that surrounded me. With constant change, I found that a relationship with an object goes beyond its utility becoming a way of archiving our place in time. Collected objects and crafted spaces ground our sense of belonging in the world. Using the iconography of the domestic, I explore the emotional valence and affect of interiors, exteriors, as well as the spaces in-between.

​    My work stems from family traditions of weaving, gardening, and jerry-rigging. By combining the processes of ceramics with basketry, I pinch and weave clay vessels. Baskets, chairs, and screens all stand as a mass of interwoven coils. Through the addition of hemp fibers and the strain of kiln firing, I seek to create ceramic forms that viscerally move. It is in the balances and tensions between pattern and plainness, soft and heavy, stable and precarious, that my work lingers. Both intimate and monumental, the objects and interior spaces I create speak to the perennial need to be and belong.

                                                                                                                - Anna Valenti