Artist Statement

Sydney's artistic work is preoccupied with identity, relationships, love, and suffering, which she explores through a variety of media, including painting, ceramics, and sculpture. Humans are constrained to bodies, to physical experiences of touch, smell, taste, and sight, and yet we are obsessed with cerebral matters. Much of her work touches upon universal human experience, mainly, the transcendentals-the innate longing for truth, beauty, and goodness-alongside the inevitability of suffering.

Her ceramic work considers the individual and communal experience. Functional ceramics can speak to the heart's longing for the transcendentals, enhancing the lonesome meal, and enriching meals taken in community. Her mind endlessly tangles and untangles its beliefs, and through material, searches for the spaces in and between what Ecclesiastes names "eternity in the hearts of men" and the words of Genesis "from dust we came and to dust we will return."