I am a Filipino ceramist who trained with Tessy and Jon Pettyjohn at their workshop in Laguna, Philippines. Afterwards, I did my Bachelors in Visual Arts at the Australian National University, followed by a diploma in Art History at the University of British Columbia. I completed my Masters in Fine Arts at the Alberta College of Art and Design in 2018. My thesis, A study in restraint, nanlaban, was a response in the idiom of studio pottery, to the violence of the Duterte regime in the Philippines.

 

After my MFA, I began a PhD in Art History at UBC for which I proposed to write a dissertation on Dora Billington, Dora Lunn, Denise Wren, and the origins of British Studio Pottery. I quit my PhD at the height of this apparently now permanent pandemic, although correlation is not exactly causation, in this case. 

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From 2023 to 2024, I spent a year in Salt Spring Island, BC, working in the studio of Judy Weeden. I have since moved to Istanbul with my wife, Gizem Sözen. 

 

NowhereClay is what I call my pottery, it is named after the post-revolutionary utopia imagined by William Morris in his serialised book, News From Nowhere.