Early life and education
Horie was raised in Lewiston/Auburn Maine by a Japanese-American family. She worked with her hands from an early age and continues to find inspiration in Maine's people, landscape, architecture, objects and history of craft. Before studying ceramics, Horie worked as a documentary photographer, shooting for weekly newspapers in Seattle. She sees a connection between her photographs of everyday life and her conceptual and formal interests as a potter. Horie holds a BA from Mount Holyoke College, a BFA in ceramics from theWork
Horie is known for her functional pots, often featuring drawings of animals, made using a waterless throwing technique that preserves the gestural quality of clay. This "dry throwing" technique, developed while an undergraduate at Alfred, records evidence of the history of each pot's making. Fingerprints and imperfections inherent in clay such as stretching, cracking, and sagging create a sense of vulnerability and emotional connection to the user. The hand-scratched sgraffito animal drawings on her pots are inspired equally by natural history illustrations and Japanese manga. The "cuteness" of these images, heightened by the bold and playful use of color, is a way of further eliciting a sense of softness and humanity. In addition to her studio practice, Horie works collaboratively on projects that consider the relationship between ceramics and the wider community. Horie's work is in various collections throughout the United States, including thCommunity engagement
For Horie, pots not only create intimacy between individuals but can deepen connections to community and become agents of social change. She is the curator of the Instagram feed Pots in Action, one of the first crowdsourced projects in ceramics, featuring contributions and guest hosts from around the world. The project evolved from a personal website begun in 2005, in which she collected photographs of her pots in use in daily life and plotted them on a Google Map. Horie has co-organized multiple online craft-based fundraisers, beginning with Obamaware in 2008 which was the first online fundraiser of its kind and gained unprecedented response beyond the usual ceramic audience. This was followed by Handmade For Japan in 2011, which raised over $100,000 for disaster relief following the great East Japan earthquake and tsunami. Understanding handcraft to be a political choice that celebrates individual creativity within a society based on mass consumerism, Horie works to expand the audience for functional pottery and to showcase clay as a medium that uniquely reflects everyday human experience. Since 2002, she has participated in the Artstream Nomadic Gallery, a restored 1967 Airstream trailer that operates as a mobile alternative exhibition space and has traveled to over 150 locations. In 2009, she collaborated on a tile mapping installation at Greenwich House Pottery, which used data from the Mannahatta Project to raise ecological awareness. Begun in 2015Awards
Horie has received numerous awards and honors in the field, including: *201References
External links
* * * * {{DEFAULTSORT:Horie, Ayumi 1969 births Living people American potters American women ceramists American ceramists People from Lewiston, Maine People from Auburn, Maine American artists of Japanese descent 20th-century American artists 20th-century American women artists 21st-century American artists 21st-century American women artists Mount Holyoke College alumni New York State College of Ceramics alumni University of Washington School of Art + Art History + Design alumni Artists from Maine Women potters 21st-century ceramists