Sunshine Cobb
(she/they)
Helena, MT
Biography
Sunshine Cobb , (pronouns she/they) As a full-time studio artist living in Helena ,MT she specializes in handmade functional pottery. She frequently travels (online these days) the country as an invited lecturing and demonstrating artist. Her work has drawn both critical praise for its whimsical rustic style. She is considered an important contemporary functional potter, hailed in both academic and commercial circles, and is consistently featured in art exhibitions throughout the country. With a strong social media following and online media presence, she represents an innovator in online business models in the ever-changing ceramics field and a leading advocate for functional art in modern living. She devotes time and effort into growing a ceramics community locally and nationally. Besides volunteering demonstration time for local k-12 art programs, she works with artists, seeking mentorship, to develop their practice and learn about the field they are seeking to enter. She also authored a book “Mastering Hand Building”, in 2018 with Voyager Press. Middle aged white woman, hair is in short faux style, wears glasses, heavy set build.
Artist Statement
I want my work in clay to represent growth and accomplishment, in which I believe reminiscence and nostalgia play a part. I rely on texture and color to create a sense of motion and time in my work. I hope to instill a sense of age, like one finds apparent in discarded objects, with the aim to infuse feelings of nostalgia and wanderlust in my ceramic objects. By exploring and creating vessels kept within arms reach, I hope to communicate how an object’s significance can grow and change depending on the path of a person’s life. And how the relationship between function and ornament shift throughout the course of a day/week/year. Through form and surface my goal is to communicate a sense of home and memory but also to evoke that feeling of wanderlust that has informed my own life and visual sensibilities.
