Experimenting with minerals and fire to achieve beauty in imperfection, inviting one’s gaze to linger

In high school, Jerry’s ceramics teacher had him sketch egg shapes endlessly, claiming they are "the most perfect form in nature,” until that contour became instinct. Decades later, when Jerry returned to the kickwheel in 2024, he tapped back into that latent image of eggness. Month after month, he threw, refined, and threw again, slowly restoring the essence of that form. Beyond the contour, Jerry considers how the eye travels across each piece. It’s the arc of the shoulder, the complement of the lip, the proportion of the foot, along with deliberate bevels and incised lines that invite one's gaze, not to look away, but to linger.

Drawn to the Japanese aesthetic of finding beauty in imperfection, Jerry works in the American raku tradition, a process that surrenders the finished form to the elements of minerals, fire, and air. He pulls glowing-hot glazed pieces from the kiln and plunges them into combustible materials. The flames, rapid cooling, and oxygen deprivation do their unpredictable work, sharpening metallic lusters, crackling the glaze, and burning smoky carbon marks. You can read the flames licking up the surface of the pieces. No two pieces record the fire in the same way.

Every vessel is handmade in Chicago and one of a kind. These are not functional objects — they are the spontaneous collaboration between the potter and the flame. 

Jerry smokes a tobacco pipe and lives with his wife and daughter in Chicago, IL.