BIO

Stephen Homer grew up in Columbus, Ohio on 4 acres surrounded by fields, trees, and ample gardening space. Stephen enjoyed playing in the dirt and with plants, creating small gardens in rain puddles at the end of the driveway, building things from found old wood and rusty hardware, propagating and caring for all manner of plants, keeping aquariums and all sorts of pets, all of which influence his work today. Stephen currently resides in Kansas City, Missouri where he is completing his BFA in Ceramics at the Kansas City Art Institute and teaches pottery and private lessons with Belger Crane Yard Studios. He has a large collection of houseplants, enjoys playing video games, reading science fiction, and cooking, with hopes to one day work again on his food blog, herbandslate.com.

ABOUT MY WORK

My work explores the intersections between humans, the natural world, and the artificial spaces we create for ourselves, embracing a range of topics such as anthropomorphic climate change, resource exploitation, our relationship to plants, and our narrow standards of beauty. I seek to bring things overlooked into focus and to create a jumping point for conversations about how we interact with the world around us and specifically with plants, upon which our very survival depends. My work is about questioning, it is exploration, it is the starting point and not the finish line. 

I work within the language of ceramics, a dialogue between the world around me, past, present, and future and the very earth itself. The primal nature of clay and its versatility allows me to explore expression in ways that allow me to expand upon the seeds of influence to create pieces rich with texture that are both familiar and alien, encouraging closer interaction and pulling the viewer in. Elements of decay and birth intermingle, blurring the oft considered sharp delineation of the two, discomfort tempered with hope. Having grown up with an affinity for plants and encouraged in that interest from a young age, their influence can not only be felt throughout my work, but also as integral pieces of my work, allowing them space for their own language to be experienced. 

Experimentation is a large part of my practice, whether it’s working toward clay bodies for hyper-specific qualities, or new methods for carving and manipulating the material, there is always a great deal of work “unseen” that contributes to the deepness of my work and my connection with the materials and my craft. Having this deep dialogue with my materials allows me to embrace forms that are often precarious and seemingly on the verge of collapse or decay, a nod to the ephemeral nature of everything and the beauty of the liminality of existence which brings about a sense of expectation and begs the question: what next? Which is what my work is really all about.