Taylor Sijan
Taylor Sijan
Taylor grew up between the shores of Lake Erie and the woods of northern Ohio. Her interest in the arts began in high school, when she started teaching herself to draw and paint realism. As an undergraduate student, she studied illustration and metalsmithing, before becoming enamoured by ceramics in late 2015.
Taylor earned her BFA in Ceramics and Metalsmithing at Bowling Green State University in 2016. After which, she spent two years in Wichita, Kansas as a post-bacc student at Witchita State University, studying wood and soda-fired pottery with Ted Adler and Brenda Lichman and was the Student Volunteer Coordinator for Empty Bowls Wichita, a large, nonprofit fundraiser to benefit those in need through the Kansas Food Bank. She has been recognized in juried exhibitions nationally and has received several notable awards, including the International 2016 NICHE Award for Student Ceramic Sculpture and several grants.
Taylor is currently pursuing a Masters of Fine Arts in Ceramics at University of Nebraska-Lincoln as a graduate teaching assistant. Despite her emphasis on functional, decorated pottery, she also enjoys small-scale metalsmithing, bookbinding, drawing, gardening, and cooking as other creative outlets.
I create functional objects that entice the viewer (like a flower to a bee) to pick up, investigate, and ultimately utilize the pottery in their everyday life. I make decorated vessels because they are not simply decorative. They demand intimate interaction and act upon their surroundings and our lives in a direct way, both as an aesthetic experience and as a useful tool. I use decoration to connect the viewer with an evocative and imaginary surface that is organized with areas of abstracted, dynamically sweeping vines and leaves, geometric spaces, and botanical drawings to attract and draw the eye around the pot, revealing interaction between the ground, the negative space, and the form. Through these drawings, I adorn my pots with drawings of botanical symbolism and ornamentation, to enrich the surface and imbue the vessel with deeper meaning. These drawings are at times a metaphor for my own memories and experiences, or simply a symbolic reference to the density and complexity of plant life, as well as the Western medicinal folk symbolism behind herbs and flowers.
