Jaden Estes Carlson is an award-winning ceramic artist based near Kearney, Nebraska. Named a 2025 Ceramics Monthly Emerging Artist and a 2026 Haystack Artist Grant Initiative recipient and cohort member, Carlson creates sculptural vessels, wall works, and large-scale installations that explore the relationships between pattern, form, and lived experience. Her work brings together rich color, expressive contours, and geometric patterns that bend and shift across ceramic surfaces.
Carlson’s work has been exhibited nationally, including in the 26th San Angelo North American Ceramic Competition at the San Angelo Museum of Fine Arts, juried exhibitions at Red Lodge Clay Center, and Abel Contemporary’s 23rd Annual Ceramics Invitational. Her solo exhibitions include Where Pattern Rests at the Lux Center for the Arts and Inheritance at Radial Arts Center. Her honors include Best in Show in Ceramics at Gallery 1516’s Nebraska Biennial and a Juror’s Choice Award at the Erie Art Museum.
She holds an MFA in Ceramics from Edinboro University of Pennsylvania and a bachelor’s degree in Art Education from the University of Nebraska at Kearney. Carlson works full-time from her studio, creating sculptural ceramics and wall works while expanding her practice in large-scale installation.
Working by hand, I build forms through an intuitive interest in curves, abrupt angles, and changes in direction. These shifts give patterns different surfaces to inhabit and, in unpatterned works, create contours for the eye to follow. Texture offers another way to explore pattern through repetition, rhythm, and variations in the surface. Their proportions sometimes suggest a body or a gesture, associations I notice and welcome as the work develops.
I am drawn to rich, earthy colors, especially the saturated warmth of red clay. Its color is integral to the forms I build, sometimes remaining exposed and sometimes interacting with added color and pattern. For me, its mineral richness becomes a metaphor for accumulated lived experience, the many things we carry that become part of who we are.
People and relationships are also present in my thinking. The experiences of women remain important to me within a broader interest in how we are shaped by where we live and by one another. The relationship between an underlying pattern and its changing shape offers me a way to consider how we, too, are altered by experience while retaining something of ourselves.
