About the Artist
Jaden Estes Carlson is a contemporary ceramic artist based in Nebraska. Her sculptural ceramic work explores pattern and surface as systems of memory, informed by textiles, domestic histories, and architectural ornament. Through deliberate repetition and subtle deviation, Carlson investigates how form can hold personal and collective narratives.
Her work considers ceramics as objects of presence, emphasizing material, scale, and surface as primary sites for contemplation.
Artist Statement
My hand-built ceramic work investigates pattern as a site of tension between order and instability. Drawing from textiles, quilts, and tile traditions, I use repetition and structure to examine how systems of expectation shape lived experience. Pattern functions as both framework and constraint, revealing how rigid ideals shift and fracture when pressed onto bodies, spaces, and histories.
This body of work considers the relationship between place and home, where familiarity can oscillate between comfort and containment. Tiles operate as both material and metaphor, referencing durability, ornament, and enclosure. Through repeated forms and layered surfaces, the work reflects the accumulation of inherited experiences and the quiet weight they carry.
Terra cotta, with its mineral density and historical associations, becomes a vessel for memory and resilience. The visible marks left through pinching, compression, and manipulation register time, pressure, and touch. Together, form and surface hold traces of endurance and transformation, situating the work within an ongoing conversation about identity, structure, and the persistence of inherited narratives.