artistic exploration

“It was mesmerizing and thrilling to me, transforming this ball of clay into whatever I wanted to see,” says Anderson, now a renowned ceramicist based in Los Angeles, fresh from his second solo exhibition at Sargent’s Daughters gallery, which ran from February to April of this year.

Since Swarthmore, Anderson has been assembling a ravishing body of ceramic work.

His complex, multilayered forms coated with vivid and shimmering glazes explore weighty topics like queerness and race.

But his clay creations also teeter on the edge of humor and whimsy. His works, from vessels to sculptural forms and paintings, incorporate cartoonish elements. A white rabbit has love hearts for ears. A lemon wearing red lipstick gazes into a pond like Narcissus.

At the same time, Anderson draws from an ancient ceramic tradition, applying the glazing techniques he learned as a Fulbright scholar at the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou.

Were it not for Swarthmore, where he majored in studio arts and Chinese, his wide-ranging practice would be quite different, Anderson says.

“In college, I was encouraged to absorb many different areas of knowledge and see how they all related to my creative practice. It all continues to inform my practice, from Western art to psychology to architecture,” he says.

After graduation, Anderson completed a master of fine arts at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has taught ceramics at the University of Southern California and California State University, Long Beach.

Anderson’s most recent exhibition, called Everything is made of light, showed the artist at his most metaphysical. A sequence of works explored the idea of infinity, and flowing forms considered how ceramics freeze energy and movement in place.

His interest in how art can engage with spiritual questions is deepening.

“My work has always been about what it means to be alive today,” Anderson says. “Before, I approached that question through the lens of race and identity. Now, I’ve moved toward a more literal consideration of what it means to have an animating force inside of a form.”