Katherine Pon-Cooper is an artist pursuing her BFA in Ceramics at the Maryland Institute College of Art, with an anticipated graduation date of 2025. She was born and raised in Charlotte, North Carolina, and draws inspiration from the state’s tradition of folk pottery. She was exposed to this local craft community by attending workshops and working as a studio assistant at the Penland School of Craft. Pon-Cooper works primarily in functional pottery, using wheel-thrown forms to explore her mixed racial identity, sentimentality, memory, and the impermanence of human connection. Her first solo exhibition, Circle In Circle: Compulsion, was featured in BMoreArt Magazine. 

Clay has memory, recording each press, pinch, and pull, every touch an addition of strength and an assertion of affection. The archival qualities of fired ceramic act as a safe for my most treasured souvenirs– protected by layers of glass and vitrified clay. In hardened clay, my memories will not deteriorate the way they do in my head. I embrace the muscle memory of throwing. I am a potter, a historian, and a frequent forgetter. I record my experiences of grief and love in clay, preserving the moment of each interaction within a medium that remembers. My work is an archival effort, recalling love letters, inside jokes, and eulogies, shaping my own personal history in an accumulation of pots. Within this archive of love and grief, I examine my own identity in the context of my family. I am drawn to moments of loss: loss of ancestors, histories, culture, language; I am a composite formed of things forgotten. I ground my mixed racial identity within the tradition of American folk pottery, Asian American in itself, to explore this internal intersection.