Will Dickert

Candler, North Carolina
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Bio

Will Dickert is a father, husband, studio potter and educator in Asheville, NC. He creates stoneware pottery and vessels in his shared studio space situated among a vibrant community of makers and artists along the French Broad River.  He was raised in Bristol, Virginia, the middle of three brothers, and has a strong affinity and love for the people and natural environment of the Southern Appalachian region and Blue Ridge Mountains.  He completed a Bachelor of Arts degree with a focus in Ceramics from the University of North Carolina Asheville, and as a post baccalaureate student received a North Carolina Art Education licensure. Teaching and exposing his community to craft and art of clay is a passion that continues to play a significant role in his involvement in the arts as a whole.  His work is wood fired using a number of techniques and kilns both traditional and contemporary in design and effect. He has exhibited his work nationally and internationally and is represented in a number of private and public collections. Will enjoys live music, vegetable gardening, hiking and backpacking, summer camps, cooking, eating, Jeopardy!, tennis, beer, baseball, skiing, and is a new parent of two boys with his brilliant and beautiful and wife.

Artist Statement

My work is most influenced by a strong sentimentality for my past and close consideration for how those experiences and relationships have shaped my life and decisions. I aim to elicit feeling, memory or sentiment through my artwork that relates to time, place, people, purpose and impermanence through the treatment of and reaction to the materials I use – stoneware clay and wood fire. I seek a sense of rhythm, evolution, chance and persistence in and through my studio practice. The direct record of response to touch and manipulation of the raw material, as well as the involved, deliberate loading and firing of my work in wood-burning kilns provides me with a balance of control and intentionality chance, and serendipity throughout the long process.  The surfaces I seek are an aesthetic that echoes the tones, textures, and variation I experience in materials of both the natural and constructed world around me. The constant loop of deterioration and renewal of the seemingly lasting components of our physical world compels me to create objects that reference the beauty inherent in our universal vulnerability to time and change.