Chandra Beadleston

Chandra Beadleston
Kansas City, Kansas

I am a Thai-American ceramicist and art educator, born and raised in Kansas City. I have been a public school teacher for 23 years. My professional work has been in both national and international exhibitions, including the International Orton Cone Box Show.

 My art explores the overlaps of clay with fabric and paper and uses thin porcelain slabs covered in decorative layers of underglaze and mason stains to mimic both. The folds and wrinkles are intended to capture both light and shadow on the porcelain surfaces. My love of fabric, the prints, the ways it wrinkles and folds, and the memories associated with it come from my grandma. My grandmother, Alice, used to sew my sister and me matching outfits, blankets and dolls. She showed us her love using that language. I get a feeling of nostalgia looking back at the pictures and seeing the time and care that went into them. The hum of a sewing machine regulates me in the same way that rolling out a slab of clay does. I roll out all of my slabs very thin. They are all rolled out by hand, and each finished piece I make has healed me in a way I could not have predicted. Each time I open the kiln, it is with the same excitement and anticipation as Christmas morning. While children will grow out of their matching outfits, ceramics are forever. That is one of the things I love about it most. It is fragile but everlasting. Ceramics is also the most fickle of the art mediums. It lifts you up, then breaks your heart. Clay is something I will always keep coming back to, for it is the thing with which I have had one of the longest relationships.