I was very fortunate to grow up with fine crafts. My father, Jim Camp, was a potter and a glass maker. My mother, Kay Camp, was a fiber artist. Eventually my mother became a teacher and later a retail executive. And my father went into the gallery field. Ultimately they created J Camp Gallery in New York....an internationally known gallery featuring tribal textiles, sculpture, and jewelry. Many of the beads that decorate my bead boxes are the remnants of inventory from the gallery.
My pottery is handbuilt stoneware. I look for beauty in everyday objects and stoneware is the perfect, sturdy clay for everyday use. My personal aesthetic is influenced by Japanese and Southwest pottery and by the Southwest landscape. I love ancient things...old beads, old handmade rugs, ruins, petroglyphs, mountains. And I am especially drawn to pottery that shows "the hand of the maker". I like glazes with depth and movement and use a lot of shino and tenmokku glazes, which are Japanese. I often texture my surfaces to give the glaze more surfaces to play on. I do hand building...mostly slab work but also some other techniques. I throw each slab by hand and then I give them a final roll to insure even thickness to work with. Each piece is time consuming to create but that's one of the things I love about hand building: the meditative connection with each piece as it comes to life.