Artist Statement

My work starts with language, not to pin things down, but to sit with what language cannot hold. I am drawn to the familiarity of typography and how quickly it can shift from ordinary to charged. In the Communication series, letters behave less like symbols and more like objects. They can rest, lean, interrupt, conceal, separate, or refuse to cooperate.

Glass and ceramic let those conditions live in the work. Glass asks for timing and commitment. Clay keeps the record of touch, pressure, hesitation, and revision. Between them, communication becomes something you can feel. A surface, a weight, a distance, a trace.

These pieces do not resolve into a single meaning. They hold space for the moments around meaning. When something almost lands, when it changes as you say it, when it cannot be said cleanly, or when what is understood is not what was intended. I keep returning to that in between space where language is still forming and already slipping away.

-Mike da Ponte