🎧 Emily Counts: Choose Your Own Adventure Erin Shafkind

Appears in the April 2025 issue of Ceramics Monthly.

The audio file for this article was produced by the Ceramic Arts Network staff and not read by the author.

Magic, abundance, growth, and decay: contrast the surface of our bodies, beauty, and the surface of the moon. Makeup and fashion have their roles in the world of fairy tales, the supernatural, and make believe. With clay, Plexiglas, fabric, sound, light, and video, Emily Counts creates immersive multi-textural environments. She invites us to circle up and find our energetic sources, to connect with our animal selves—to spin like spiders, patching together a world, while at the same time unraveling ourselves—emancipation comes in various forms evolving before our senses. 

Maps of Life

Her visual language considers what exists in the realm of the physical, but persists in the mystery of the unseen. She shares, “Any area of our lives that contains a lot of mystery is a creative place for me. I’m drawn to the mysterious.” She uses the literal senses; sight, sound, texture, and wonders about the neuro-sensitive brain in our belly, thinking with our gut. Her works are maps of her life and the lives she’s encountered. She defines her figures as composites of multiple people, including herself in the mix. They are loved ones from her past; a grandmother, a great grandmother, a best friend all in one. She is from Seattle, Washington, and her installations and home have a distinctive Pacific Northwest vibe. Nature, the woods, muted sunset tones, cool blues. As I’m writing this, filmmaker and artist David Lynch has died. Lynch’s themes of mystery, horror, and the unknown have been inspiring to Counts. Kyle Maclachlan has written of Lynch, “This version of me doesn’t exist without him.” We are all parts of the people we’ve known and who we will know, prisms of experience and connection, a rich quilt of stories filled with ever-shifting pieces. 

“Sea of Vapors” is the name of a crater on the moon and is also the most recent title of an exhibition at Oregon Contemporary, a non-profit arts space in Portland, Oregon. What lies in the craters of the moons orbiting our lives? Counts’ poetic response, “Secrets, memories, emotions, ghosts.” The works in the show are symbols of our past, present, and future. We see faces teased apart with double sets of eyes, vampire mouths, upside-down noses, and several selves in oneself. Hearing, seeing, tasting, touching; what scents do the senses sense, and how about the gut? How does the nervous system respond? A dozen figures stand in a circle on a plywood octagon platform. Each figure has an animal companion, a familiar. As sculptures, they represent multidimensional beings, the supernatural. They are spirit companions to the figures within her latest installation. The pieces have me thinking about connections with people, animals, and even aspects of ourselves. The companionship of animals provides comfort with the unknown. Light glows through her installations. Cats, fruit, and faces are often lanterns emanating internal energy and power. She described the power as, “confidence and strength, without violence or control.” Her pieces create a collective vortex of belonging, a power of sensitivity, comfort, and assurance. Like nature and cycles constantly turning, her work reminds us we are not in control, but we can try to perceive beyond the obvious. For me, it takes time and patience to slow down, to breathe deeper and more deliberately. 

Spider Instinct Phone Call—one of the dozen figures made of multiple materials; a poppy-colored plywood base, a ceramic torso with attached arms, hands, and head, the mouth sends a vaporous Plexiglas message to a telephone. The receiver of the phone sits on a blood-iron-red ceramic stump. A silver squirrel chirps in its hole and little flowers sprout and droop nearby. Next to the stump is the body of the push-button or dial-up vintage clay phone. Her icons are like bracelet charm dreams, sirens singing gentle songs—a flower, moth, spider, warm-hue rainbow crooning, “Press me, touch me, I’m a puffy sticker lifesaver, wanting to melt in your mouth.” The face is also a lantern. The stomach winks while digesting a spider who spins the answers to everything, we are not anxious, we are curious. There’s a sensualness to her works, and something creepy yet comforting all happening in unison. 

An Abundance of Expression 

Counts’ sculptures are stories that shift, as do our memories, our relationships with others, and the constant swirl of decisions we make each day. I asked her about the vampire mouths that some of her faces have. She shared, “They connect with the supernatural theme: ghosts, vampires, imagined beings. Similar to the spider and dagger, there’s an element of danger. Thinking about myself and humans in general, devouring, dangerous but not evil.” She continued, “They represent ideas around self sabotage, the uncontrollable, destruction, darkness beyond our grasp, the difficult parts of human nature.” There’s a balance of realism and the fantastical in her art. The abundance of expression fills me up and helps provide space to be present, inquisitive, and receptive. 

Around the corner from the coven of twelve sits the Grandmother Wizard Queen. She is the surreal architect birthing the lands of magic, curiosity, and wonder. Her body rests gargantuan, three times the size of a human. Her gold lamé frock undulates, a video projection animates her heart—a spider obsessively weaving, spinning, constantly turning. Giant lipsticks open at her feet, beauty born from the grandmother. Gathered around her body; mushrooms, daggers, and fruit—some made of clay others sewn with velvet and lamé fabric—promise protection and truth, everything droops and dies, the only constant is change. Two clay hands reach high, almost touching two plush moths above. The queen’s ceramic head and crown rest on her shoulders, another lantern whose eyes and mouths seem to cry and sigh and peek with knowledge of their own. 

The Evolution and Mystery of Life 

She started using clay in her pre-teen years at local community centers and took ceramic classes in high school in Seattle, Washington. She attended the California College of Art in Oakland, California, and holds a BFA in painting. Finishing school just before the century turned, she moved around a bit; Illinois, New Mexico, and Oregon, before returning to Seattle and then settling in Tacoma, Washington, with her husband and two cats. Her husband, Josh Machniak, creates ambient sound works for her installations. Her studio occupies two rooms in her home and she fires a Skutt in her basement. She uses various mid-range stoneware and porcelain clay bodies mainly for slab-built sculpture. Her extensive painting background provides a perfect combination of technique and curiosity which play on the surface of her pieces. Varied matte and gloss colors made from blending commercial glazes are staples in her color palette. A range of neutral tones and warm hues evoke the glamour of department store make-up counters. Yellows, oranges, and occasionally blues are consistent in her palette as well. 

As part of “So Familiar,” a 2023 exhibit at studio e gallery in Seattle, Counts gave an artist talk and was asked, “What do you do to take care of yourself? What do you do in your downtime?” She answered, “I get so much joy from my cats.” As a cat owner myself, I felt grateful for this recognition of the calming interaction our pets may bring. In Spider Thoughts Familiar, one of Counts’ companion works to their figures, she’s handbuilt a hollow-bodied animal lantern with pink-hued light emanating from orifices and two flower heart holes. A spider sits above one eye, their thoughts pre-occupying the familiar. I hear it whisper sweet nothings in the kitty’s ear. An open mouth waits in the third eye position above the bridge of the kitty’s nose. All the mouths in Counts’ work are sighing, singing, longing for life. The honey fur coat glaze glistens with bits of gold luster. The stems of the flowers are like textured embroidery. Her grandmothers’ essence has had a hand in this work. The feminine within the handmade is ever present, as are the themes of ripeness, heavy fruit, hand-woven dreams, arachnid legends, and the ways the spider takes care of their children. Nature is not gentle in the deepest depths of the woods. Nature is a cycle of growth and decay, ever turning in the loamy undergrowth and blowing through the uppermost nests of the trees where heavy winds and fire do what they do whenever lightning strikes. Even the oldest trees are not spared the nature of nature. 

Counts uses art to relocate our sense of self. Her pieces thrive in multidimensional space and time. Her work continues unfolding, an expansive tapestry with props we recognize, others surreal and strange, we can choose directions through the story and perhaps be surprised at the end. Existing both internally and externally can be confusing, but her art makes room for this. Her surfaces, simple yet complex, are at once metaphors for the internal unknown and the simultaneously luscious exteriors. Eyes sparkle while mouths beckon, whispering, “Come closer—we have secrets to share. Can you sense them? Do you know this magic too?” 

the author Erin Shafkind is an artist and educator living in Seattle, Washington. To learn more, visit www.erinshafkind.com and Instagram @eshaffy.