My name is Val, and I’m a small batch, ceramic artist based in Northern Colorado. Though I work full-time as a data scientist, I explore throwing different forms on the wheel, new surface decoration techniques, and glaze chemistry in my free time.

I first got into pottery during graduate school to get away from my academic work. In contrast to academia, there was no real wrong way to do pottery. Any mistake you made could (in most cases) be fixed at another stage. Trim inside a pot? Sure! Layer a bunch of glazes? Why not? Even though experimentation was part of my academic research, there was something more freeing about experimenting in ceramics. And sure, I did study human cognition, so of course there had to be restrictions on experimenting on human subjects :)

I get most of my inspiration from nature, especially wildflowers that I see on my hikes, animals, worms, and sometimes fan art. Most of my designs are rather random, and whatever I feel like making at the time. I also love experimenting with new glaze recipes, so I’ll always have a line of simple glazed pottery.

Thanks for reading! If you want to learn more, you can head over to my portfolio on my personal website.