Nick DeVries

Nick DeVries has been working in ceramics for the past 19 years. He studied at St John’s University where, in 2001, he finished a Bachelor’s Degree in Art, with a concentration in painting and ceramics. Since his college years Nick has worked as a production potter for a Minneapolis bases pottery, taught courses at the Edina Art Center and Northern Clay Center, and has pursued his own studio ceramic work. He exhibits his work in galleries nationally. Currently he lives in Brainerd MN where he works full time as a ceramic artist. DeVries is represented by ceramics galleries nationally and has shown his work in numerous group and solo exhibitions.

Artist Statement: Most of my work originates on the potter’s wheel and are forms based in a tradition of function and use. I love how functional pots can draw people in; they can be disarming and unassuming in their overt utility. Pots call out to be held, used, and examined, like they have a certain gravity to them.

My current body of work is made from porcelain and white stoneware. I often work in a reductive fashion, throwing heavier pieces, then altering, rasping, and carving the pots to reveal the final forms. I enjoy balancing large areas of subtle texture and color with small additions: stamps and other details that suggest windows or doorways. These forms and small details reference architecture and structure while the surfaces borrow from nature. Subtle textures suggest grass or bark; areas of micro crystalline glaze reference the random beauty of nature: lichens growing on a rock outcropping, the subtle coloration of river rock, the random intricacies of a leaf.

I enjoy juxtaposing architectural and structural qualities with surfaces that reference the natural world. I’ve always been drawn to human made structures and objects that have been affected by nature. I am interested in the ways in which we interact with nature, sometimes sustainably and other times in more contradictory and destructive ways. We attempt to tame, claim, and use the natural world around us, but nature always pushes back. Paint peels, metal rusts, buildings crumble; we are constantly being reminded that we are not entirely in control, we are no masters.

My hope is to create work that draws the user in to a tactile and visual interaction that might elicit a response to these physical qualities; that perhaps a moment of contemplation, consciously or not, may happen as fingers and hands work over the finished pots.