Addison Woolsey
Instagram: @addisonwoolsey
Addison Woolsey is a California-based clay artist. His work explores the specific ways that ceramics — in its various iterations as sculpture, craft, vessel, folk art — can help us understand what it means to be human, to be alive, and to live with others. His sculptures and vessels are built at varying scales dependent on the constraints of local studio access. Acknowledging and responding to these constraints turns the studio into an ethnographic site, where clay, glaze, form, and firing atmosphere serve as indexes of the cultural and ecological context of ceramic production.
I met Mandi in 2018 while living with my parents in Seattle. I had just moved back from several years living in Mexico City, and I was struggling with being home, feeling stuck and generally anxious. After taking her paper clay course at Pottery Northwest, we became friends and I often would check in with her and Pico when at the studio. Mandi’s mentorship was about modeling what it could mean to be a working artist— she was never dogmatic about what her students or younger artists should be doing, making, thinking, but she was honest and vulnerable about the ambiguity that come with a career in art. What I now know—and Mandi was one of the first artists I met who showed me this—is that at its core art is a practice of living with uncertainty. I am grateful to have met her early in my practice and to have seen the ways her work and life were entangled. Spending time in the studio was essential, but I think Mandi's work was also about being alive; about gardening, walking, the sky over Puget Sound, and bringing people together. Now I try to grow my practice with this image in mind, of life and work braided together.