2025
ARTIST STATEMENT
My work explores the tension between permanence and erosion, how material holds memory, and how time leaves its mark. In Scorched Earth, I use ceramic vessels as sites of transformation, tracing a physical and conceptual arc through cracking, blistering, and rupture. These surfaces are not merely decorative; they are records—of pressure, of heat, of change.
This series began as a response to ecological collapse, but it has grown into a meditation on endurance and adaptation. I’m interested in how things decay and persist, how geological forces mirror human experience, and how destruction can also create space for unfamiliar forms of beauty. Each piece is built with intention, but the kiln always intervenes, introducing chance, loss, and alchemical surprise.
Making is how I process what feels too big to hold. My vessels respond to long, slow disasters; drought, erosion, collapse. Coiled by hand and textured with slips and oxides, they hold the tension between control and surrender. The clay resists. It collapses. The fire transforms. That unpredictability is the point. These objects carry the scars of their own making, evidence of having passed through something difficult and come out changed.
My background in design shapes how I approach form and surface. I draw from a daily practice of observing weathered materials like rust, lichen, concrete, earth and I translate those textures through layering, wiping back, and reacting to what emerges. Unlike my industrial design work, this process resists optimization. It demands listening, patience, and trust.
Scorched Earth is both witness and proposition. These pieces don’t offer resolution but they insist on presence. They suggest that transformation is not just possible, but inevitable and ask what we might become on the other side.
BIO
Rebeccah Pailes-Friedman is a ceramic artist whose sculptural vessels explore transformation, erosion, and the material memory of clay. Drawing inspiration from geological processes, weathered surfaces, and ecological change, her work engages with the tension between permanence and decay. Through layering, coiling, and alchemical glaze reactions, she creates pieces that speak to survival, adaptation, and the unseen forces that shape the world around us.
Her current series, Scorched Earth, responds to climate grief and slow environmental disasters like drought and collapse. Through an intuitive process of building and breaking, she coaxes textures from the clay that register both trauma and transformation. These vessels are not static objects; they are sites of transformation, holding the trace of their own becoming.
She maintains an active studio practice in both Brooklyn and Hudson NY, and is a longtime professor of industrial design at Pratt Institute. Her work has been exhibited nationally and is held in private collections.
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Artist CV
Academic CV
Tableware Catalogue
Studio
595 Madison Street
Brooklyn, NY 11221
410 Water Street Road
Hudson, NY 12538
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Representation
Kent, CT
Kenise Barnes Fine Art
7 Fulling Lane
Kent, CT 06757
www.kbfa.com
Asheville, NC
Gallery Melange
67 Biltmore Ave
Asheville, NC 28801-3632
www.gallerymelange.com