Pottitude • Celia Wiley

Visual Art – San Francisco

I grew up in modest circumstances in San Francisco's Mission District, but handmade ceramics were always a fixture in my home. My mother comes from a family of artists ; my grandfather was a photographer and his brother was a talented potter who worked from the 1920s to the 50s, absorbing the ideas of the Bauhaus and other modernist movements firsthand. • I've always done creative work of some kind. As a youngster I trained to be a professional ballet dancer. Later I earned a degree in Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Not long after that I moved to Brooklyn and taught myself digital design (not necessarily in that order), which was my profession for many years. I've done other things too. • I came relatively late to ceramics—the urban public schools I went to were not big on equipment intensive art—but I've made up for lost time. Turns out that early ballet training is paying off in unexpected ways: all those hours spend spinning have given me an odd affinity for the pottery wheel. And the design background doesn't hurt either.