2025 Pots n Prints
Juror’s Remarks
It was an honor to jury the 2025 Pots-n-Prints Exhibition, but it was no easy task! The field of selection was as excellent as it was varied. With printmakers consistently combining compelling imagery with technical mastery, and ceramicists demonstrating a broad range of the wonders that can be accomplished with clay, it was a pleasure to view each of the submissions.
At the San Angelo Museum of Fine Arts, I work with ceramic objects every day, since ceramic art is our main collections focus. The versatility of clay as an artistic medium never ceases to amaze me, but what amazes me more is the skill, control, and limitless creativity employed by ceramic artists in its use. The examples in this show are no exception. Amelea Varos’ bottle vases stunned me when I saw them in person, with their perfection of form and mesmerizing surface decoration in such a small package, and Sarah Clark’s Drink Caddy unites beauty and utility seamlessly, while celebrating the contrast between the earthiness and tactility of the clay cups and the cool, smooth, mid-century design of the thrifted caddy.
The prints in the exhibition, ranging from ancient techniques such as woodcut to the Renaissance intaglio techniques perfected by Dürer and Rembrandt, to relatively modern techniques such as screen printing, are superb examples of their medium. The imagery is evocative and sometimes provocative. Matthew Egan’s One Fish, Two Fish, Three Fish is a masterful lithographic retelling of Rabelais for the current times--visual satire that stings, disturbs, and amuses simultaneously.
Printmaking and Ceramics might seem, at first glance, like two drastically different media, but both demand tight control and a specialized knowledge of material and process, combined with aesthetic sensibility and imagination, to be successful as artistic endeavors. Congratulations to all the artists represented in this exceptional exhibition.
Laura Romer Huckaby
Curator, San Angelo Museum of Fine Arts
June 2025