The 2025 Alabama Clay Conference
was held in Tuscaloosa, AL
from January 30-February 2.

Our 2025 Featured Presenting Artists included Natalia Arbelaez, Stuart Gair, Toni Losey, and Olivia Tani.

2025 Curtis Benzle Distinguished Artist Lecture speaker was James C Watkins.

Special Thanks

The Alabama Clay Conference would like to extend a special thank you to the University of Alabama Department of Art and Art History and Crimson Clay, the student ceramics organization, for their support of the 40th Annual Alabama Clay Conference.

Mission of the Alabama Clay Conference

The Alabama Clay Conference, as an initiative of the Alabama Visual Arts Network, serves practitioners and students of the ceramic arts. The conference celebrates and promotes the unique flavor of ceramics in Alabama by offering a balance of exhibition and educational programs intended to increase professionalism, inform technique, and inspire artistic expression of all participants.

Now approaching its 40th year, the Alabama Clay Conference is the longest running program of the Alabama Visual Arts Network. The conference site and host change annually. The event celebrates and promotes the timeless artistry of ceramics by offering a balance of exhibition and educational programs intended to increase professionalism, inform technique, and inspire artistic expression in Alabama and beyond.

Registration opens each year on October 1st

The Alabama Clay Conference is made possible through registrations and sponsorships and through our vendors from the following. Please be sure to visit their websites for more information on our generous donors and sponsors:

2025 Curtis Benzle Distinguished Artist Lecture speaker

2025 FEATURED PRESENTERS

Natalia Arbelaez

In my work, I am a storyteller. I am telling narratives about my Colombian family’s immigration, the pre-Columbian South American presence, and my American latchkey, after school cartoon childhood. All of these stories work together to create a multicomponent self-portrait of what it is like to be a Mestizo Colombian-American hybrid. Mining tidbits from historical research, familial narratives, and cartoon culture, I create surreal stories in clay much in the way Gabriel García Márquez did with words, autobiographically narrating history with its ups and downs, its humor and tears. Making my work is an act of revealing undervalued histories from Latin American, Amerindian and Women of Color. These identities are lost through conquest, migration, and time, then gained through family, culture and exploration, and finally passed down through tradition, preservation, and genetic memory. I have found value in my histories and aim to help preserve my cultures by honoring them through my artwork. In my historical and cultural studies of lost, conquered, and overlooked communities, I have found that craft and clay belong in my pursuit, and I’ve embraced it. I relate to the role of the craftsperson, which is often linked to women’s work, working class, and cultural tradition. Furthermore, my primary medium, my ancestral terracotta, has historically been considered a lesser material and the white glossy Majolica glaze that was brought over from Europe was used as a surface to hide the iron-rich clay body. I use this material as a metaphor to describe colonization and its impact on me. Other symbols in my work reflect aspects of my history that I have absorbed and personalized through my research. I often pair materials to intentionally speak of hierarchy and value disparities, such as juxtaposing gold next to terracotta. These two materials are found in the same Colombian mountains and rivers but one of the materials is deemed valuable and the other is not. When covering the terracotta in white majolica glaze, I make sure to leave portions of the bare clay exposed as a reminder that even though our history and ancestry has been whitewashed, our indigenous ancestry still remains. My goal is to reveal the truths and challenges of our past and present, forging a path for a more hopeful future.

Stuart Gair

Gair received an MFA in Ceramics from The University of Nebraska and a BAS in History from Ohio University. He has also spent time teaching at Harvard University and Colorado Mountain College and was a long-term resident at the Archie Bray Foundation.  He has a studio in Canaanville, Ohio where he has been experimenting with local clays and exploring the ceramic history of the region. He is the co-founder of Canaanville Arts Center, a gallery and artist residency that is focused on bringing nationally and internationally recognized artists to the area as well as highlighting artists and craftsman from the Appalachian region working in traditional methods.Stuart Gair grew up in Northeast Ohio where his interests in local materials, historiography and the ceramic process first began. Gair is currently an Assistant Professor of Instruction at Ohio University.

About Stuart’s work: He often references past cultures and civilizations in his work as a way to understand specific groups through the objects they created. Gairs recent research has focused on alternative ways to firing soda kilns, a process that was developed in the 1980s as an alternative to traditional salt firing techniques. This approach of adding sodium bicarbonate to the kiln yields a greater range of color in the clays surface and has a lower carbon footprint than salt.

Toni Losey

Toni Losey, born in the Canadian prairies, now lives and works as a full time ceramic artist in Halifax, Canada.  She attended both The Alberta University of the Arts and The Nova Scotia College of Art and Design where she received her BFA, focus on Ceramics.  She has received numerous national grants and bursaries and was the first Artist in Residence award recipient of Cluster Craft London. Losey’s work is shown both nationally and internationally.  She has exhibited at Collect in London, Salon Art + Design in New York, Design Miami,  SOFA Chicago, Ceramic Art London and in 2021 had her first international solo show in London.  She was named one of Ceramics Monthly Emerging Artists 2020, was short-listed for the Winifred Shantz Award 2020 and has been widely published in respected journals such as Ceramics Monthly and Ceramic Review. 

About Toni’s work: “My work is evocative of nature, of growth patterns, and the cycle of life. It presents as both inert object and living specimen; an expression of the possibilities of clay and glaze yet seemingly organic. I am fascinated by the existence of fungi and slime molds that beautifully emerge from decay: a place of loss where growth is not only possible but perhaps unavoidable. I reference these influences through the development of deeply textural, colorful, and complex works with particular attention to light and shadow.  I find the endless possibility of patterns and configurations exhilarating as they materialize through various stages of construction, deconstruction, and finish. Each sculpture implies that it was taken from its environment while still full of possibility.  Within my work, the question is posed, “Does potential still exist or has it been forever paused?”

Olivia Tani

After receiving her Bachelor of Fine Arts from Alfred University School of Art and Design in 2017, Olivia moved to Minneapolis Minnesota for a one year artist residency at Northern Clay Center as a 2017 - 2018 Fogelberg Studio Fellow. The city was her new home.  She fell in love with the Clay Center, the city and the bountiful artist community.  As her residency year was coming to a close, She was granted a personal studio space to rent and continue to work alongside the resident artists and fellow studio artists. She feels fortunate to be represented in Northern Clay Center's sales gallery and participate in the exhibitions and events held in the space. Her focus now is to continue to further develop her work utilizing the access to materials and soda kiln in the studio, and be present in the Minneapolis clay community.

About Olivia’s work: “I make work that serves as both functional and sculptural, I approach making utilitarian objects as a kind of vehicle for sculpture. In developing a form, the marriage between the two is where it is exciting. I celebrate the idea that an artwork can serve a function, while also being able to stand alone as a celebration of form, in a domestic environment. I often think about deconstructing three-dimensional forms into their two-dimensional blueprints, which inspired my interest in slab building with clay.  I build volumetric forms using several slab components made from paper templates, which are influenced by my interest in geometry, compositional balance and creating illusions of movement within fixed shapes.   I work largely with enclosed forms and double walled components that evoke a sense of fullness, volume and mass.  Visually breaking down my works, the whole form is composed of several forms that can alone stand as sculptures.  Finding how these pieces cohesively fit together to create one aesthetically, structurally and functionally successful form, is what drives my current practice.”

In addition to our featured artist presentations and workshops, these special events are part of our conference each year: