🎧 2023 Emerging Artist: Casey Beck, Lincoln, Nebraska Ceramics Monthly

Appears in the May 2023 issue of Ceramics Monthly.

Ceramics Monthly: What do you do to push yourself to stay engaged and develop new forms? What excites you about the field of ceramics?

Casey Beck: I have always wondered about what more there is; can I dig deeper and further my knowledge? Ceramics, and specifically soda firing, has offered me a thrilling and endless space of potential and mystery to work in, fulfilling this wonder. It always keeps me on my toes—every firing is a bit of a mystery and comes with a lot of risk and failure. Regardless of which way it leans, the mysteries keep things fresh. The question I am exploring lately is what alkaline-earth metals do in clay bodies as a secondary flux. I’ve learned that some of them do wonderful things and others come out of the kiln falling apart! I should have known that when my professor Pete Pinnell told me that putting lithium in a clay body wouldn’t work, it wouldn’t. I tried it anyway, and it did work—for a little while. But then the soda glaze began to shiver off. If you are reading this and are now concerned that I have sent these pots out into the world that are falling apart, please don’t worry! They’re sitting in a pile among other rejects after extensive testing.

A tool that I have been really delighted with lately is Glazy.org—it is where I do all my tinkering with clay bodies, and when they work out, I am able to publish them so that others have access to the findings. I have always been thankful for those who share their research with me, and I hope to be able to give back by sharing mine!

Graduate school has pushed me outside my comfort zone to try new things. Beyond my soda-firing research, I have been working through form language and the formal characteristics that are important to my work. I have always been fascinated by the ways in which atmospheric firing can mimic natural phenomena and have spent a lot of time developing ways in which I can capture a sense of frozen ephemerality within the kiln by creating repeating cast shadows on the work. This is done through specific placement of pieces in the kiln, fire resists, and intricate firing schedules. I have also been working to bring new visual vocabulary into my work from outside of the medium. I love the ways in which Brutalist architecture seems to defy gravity with cantilevered components and much of the visual weight lifted above the ground. I have also been interested in glassware and how the intricate forms of stemware can translate into clay. There are many captivating visual characteristics and a sense of delicacy that I have been interested in. I have been taking a lot in from many sources and building up a form vocabulary that I can reference and answer questions about through my processes and vessels. Going back to my curiosity, I am always in search of those mysteries, and there are a lot of inquiries posed by these visual interests that I have yet to answer.