Joni Beamish

Being an artist is an unwavering desire to create and experiment with the possibility of materials. It’s about balancing the needs of a being a professional artist with the need to be creative. For the last twenty five years I have taken great pleasure in working with clay, it gave me the freedom to play. Although I will admit that deriving your income from art fluctuates wildly, I still regard it as an extraordinary privilege.
To quote a fellow ceramicist, William Daley: “Being an artist is finding out who you are and why you’re special and then learning how to really use your imagination or vision, how to give it some kind of form. You develop a visual language that’s personal. You learn to make materials behave in ways that communicate your spirit and you learn to solve problems and take chances. You have to learn how to present things with clarity and passion and verve and you must do these things all at once. That is the confounding part.”