Syd Shera
Syd is a ceramic artist working in a variety of techniques within the ceramic tradition. She’s been a teacher for +25 yrs and likes to work with people’s innate creativity and help facilitate their artistic expression. She’s interested in the realm where creativity, healing and spirituality all meet and influence one another.
“My grandfather travelled the world after WWII, helping emerging economies build pulp and paper industries from their indigenous plants. We were fascinated by the lively colorful trinkets and amulets he brought back from places like India, Mexico, Sweden and Thailand. He created a completely new Xmas tree every year decorated with baubles from his travels. My grandmother, no slouch herself, taught third grade and took international cruises every summer. I have a picture of her from the 60’s in her cat eye sunglasses and clutch purse posing in front of the gnarled trees of Angkor Wat in Cambodia. She sang and played a mean ukulele, and her bridge club travelled to Hawaii every couple years. They were Irish, both families forced abroad late in the great famine diaspora. All four grandparents’ families arrived in the Pacific Northwest from afar, emigrating in the early 1900’s, from Denmark, Canada via Hudson’s Bay Co (living amongst the Nisqually people at Ft Nisqually), northern Mexico, and Ireland. I know they all appreciated the rich wide open territory of the PNW. In their retirement, there was time to teach us kids to make things from what was on hand, pick blackberries, shuck oysters, and row small boats in the lake.”
“After traveling in my 20’s and becoming a parent, it took awhile to settle down and own the wildness inside. I fell into teaching ceramics as a form of creative liberation for both adults and children. The kids reminded me every summer to dwell where inspiration happened. Now, the work shows what came from those things, forces and places I encountered in the natural world, those experiences that stopped me in my tracks. Some work comes up from the dark, merging power up from the earth, somehow investing its dark energy with creativity. It's been a wide path and challenging to understand and integrate everything. A couple years ago, it began to make sense if I came to think about all this disparate work as Folk Art.”
