FIONA WATERSTREET is a maestro of tactile expression. Having spent her career developing an organic aesthetic, her ceramics convey a distinct humanism in the enduring trace of her hand found in each object. When Waterstreet first started working with clay at the Greenwich House Pottery Studio in New York nearly fourteen years ago, she was largely throwing on a wheel. Despite having no previous arts education, and ceramics being a largely ignored branch of the fine arts, she says that she fell in love with the tactility and uncertainty of working with clay. “The art thing started to seep into me,” Waterstreet remembers. She began creating more sculptural objects, bringing a form to life within her hands.
Waterstreet enjoys the meditative process that begins in water and minerals and ends in anticipation as it transforms within a fiery kiln as she began making abstracted birds and forms from porcelain. Her bird forms are bulbous, elegant, and curious. The gentle tilt of the neck, the arch of the back, and the details of the beak: these works, more traditional to Waterstreet’s oeuvre, show her propensity for capturing the je ne sais quoi of the avian spirit in an organic, abstracted form. “Ceramics are a nut you have to crack,” says Waterstreet. “There’s an intrigue to it. Every time you open the kiln, you’re surprised.”