What Arts and Craft looks like today.
Rooted in a deep love of natural materials and today’s revival of Arts and Crafts values, her way of making connects her to generations of makers—especially the women who shaped the early Arts and Crafts movement—and to our ongoing efforts to imagine more sustainable, humane ways of living.
Her work contributes to the revaluation of craft as a transformative discipline and a future-shaping practice rooted in integrity, sustainability, and her belief that making with our hands is essential to who we are and who we can become.
Simply spirited.
April DeConick is a scholar of mysticism and a maker of things you can touch and hold. As a ceramicist and fiber artist — and a longtime professor of religious studies — she moves between two disciplines most people keep separate: the study of how humans make meaning, and the physical work of making meaningful objects.
Her sculptural, sensory-driven pieces emphasize the intimacy of touch, the physicality of emotion, and intuitive forms of knowing. April calls her practice the trace of touch: the way a pulled loop of yarn, a dense clay texture, or a lash of glaze carries a depth of feeling that language and technology can't reproduce.
How does the experience of the thing shape who we are? It's the same question she has spent a career studying — only now, she answers it with her hands instead of words. Proof, held in the object itself, that everything we touch, we change, and everything we change, changes us.