Claire Miller

BIo

Claire Miller is a ceramic artist and educator living in Bloomington, Indiana. She was raised in Portland, Oregon and has since lived in many regions of the US following an eclectic mix of opportunities. She has worked at a puppetry museum, as a chimpanzee caretaker, and most impactful, as an assistant to a potter in Montana. She has a BA in Anthropology from The College of Wooster and an MFA in Ceramics from Indiana University, Bloomington. 

Claire aspires to have her work in the collections of public libraries, community gardens, transitional housing facilities, and quiet spaces.

Artist Statement

I make inventive and lyrical handbuilt, porcelain pottery that asks a central question: how can we hold together different—sometimes opposing—parts of ourselves? I explore this through the object's construction and the use of repetition. Each object I make is composed of a joining of disparate modes of touching clay––for example, a volume pinched until the pinching begins to disappear, welded to the sharper edge of cut slabs. I am interested in the capacity of an object to arrest my preconceptions and for the work to teach me how it wants to be touched and held and cared for through all phases of becoming. I intend for my work to exist in the spaces between categories, and yet, the objects are trying to listen to the enormity of being known.

Exhibitions