Making “I Could Call Her Medusa”
One accident after another, moving into something new.
Special thanks to Jason for having me do eyeball demos for class and for helping to install the sketchiest thing ever. And to Mal for everything.
#ceramics #clay #workinprogress #wip #selfportrait #painting #underglaze #amaco #amacovelvetunderglaze #eye #figuresculpture #surrealism #stoneware #handbuilding #handbuiltceramics #sculpture #ceramicsculpture
“I Could Call Her Medusa”
2026
Something different and intuitive, what I needed to make and when I needed to make it.
#handbuilding #handbuiltceramics #clay #ceramics #art #stoneware #underglaze #amaco #amacovelvetunderglaze #selfportrait #medusa #myth #greekmythology #eye #sculpture #ceramicsculpture #gorgon #eyes
Part 2
Making “Danaide (Anyone But Hypermnestra)” for my MFA candidacy show
Drawing, painting, manipulating perspectives, glaze testing, glazing, epoxying, breaking, realizing it was always supposed to be broken, repairing, assembling, installing for so, so many hours.
#handbuiltceramics #handbuilding #ceramics #clay #art #handmade #stoneware #underglaze #amaco #amacovelvetunderglaze #painting #selfportrait #drawing
Part 1
Making “Danaide(Anyone But Hypermnestra) for my MFA candidacy show
If you’ve ever wondered how something was made, this one’s for you. It’s all just slabs, all the time, bit by bit, until it’s there.
#handbuiltceramics #handbuilding #ceramics #clay #art #handmade #stoneware
Meet the MFA Candidate Anna Johnson 🔮
Anna Johnson (she/her) is a ceramic artist whose work focuses on personal experiences and her identity as a woman, centering on narratives of sexual violence told through themes of mythology. While much of her practice centers around personal identity, violence, gender equality, memory, and mythology, she is also inspired by nostalgia and women’s shift from childhood to adulthood. Through hand-built trompe-l’oeil objects and illustrative surfaces, she creates pieces that encourage conversation, community, introspective thinking, and, she hopes, action. Her work has been shown in Georgia, Montana, and Virginia, and she was recently featured in 19 Under 39, an exhibition at the Montana Museum of Art and Culture.
Born and raised in Georgia, she received her BA in Fine Art and Art History from Berry College in 2021, and earned her MA in Art History from the University of Georgia in 2023, where she studied 6th-century Byzantine icons and was awarded distinction on her published thesis, Christ Pantocrator: God, Emperor, and Philosopher (The Byzantine Iconography of Christ). She completed her post-baccalaureate certificate in ceramics at the University of Montana in 2025 and was a visiting artist at Berry College that same year. She is currently pursuing an MFA in Craft and Material Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University.
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Anna will be participating in the upcoming 2026 MFA Candidacy Exhibition, “Late Breaking”, opening at The Anderson gallery tonight at 5 PM! On view until April 25th, “Late Breaking” will feature the work of 21 first-year graduates across VCUarts!
To learn more about this upcoming exhibition, follow the link in our bio! 🔗
@vcuarts@ayjay.clay@vcuartstheanderson
#vcuarts #vcuartscraft
The vacuum portrait wasn’t just a one-off; I’m painting again. I’m painting because I love to paint, and because it’s mine. Nobody ever taught me how. Somehow it feels more valuable like that.
In 2018, I quit art school and left SCAD. I had been really badly bullied, I was depressed, and I was grieving the biggest loss of my life. I didn’t draw again for 2 years and I resisted taking art classes when I transferred to Berry. I never wanted to make art again. But I was required to take two art classes, so I took photography and ceramics. It was as far away as I could get from drawing.
In 2020, there was a clay class that I wasn’t enrolled in in the studio in Moon Building, but I needed to art. So I took leftover white, black, and grey underglaze in globs, half dried in the bottom of a red solo cup, and I went out onto the porch, squinting under the dim porch light, and I painted on a throwaway bisque scrap. It wasn’t very good. 😂 But when I went back inside and set the little piece on my shelf and started washing up in the sink, I remember Dennis looked at it and said, “I didn’t know you could paint.”
I didn’t know I could paint either. I really couldn’t, but I was giving it a try.
In Montana, I was discouraged from painting. I let it go and focused on the sculpture alone. And then I nearly amputated half my thumb in my last semester and I couldn’t sculpt for four months. Turns out, that was a good thing, because I didn’t have a choice but to paint again. So I did, and Crista arrived the day that first painting in years came out of the kiln and she said, “you can paint!”
At the end of that semester, she gave me the really incredible gift of painting with her on her amazing sculpture— in color, which I had never done before. That was a lot of trust that, frankly, I didn’t deserve, but somehow it worked out. It gave me the confidence to paint again for myself.
So I’m painting. I don’t really know where it’ll take me, but now, finishing up my last piece of my first semester in grad school (GRAD SCHOOL?!?!), I think I’ll keep painting. I really love it. I love art again. I’m excited to finish this piece.
Happy winter break, y’all. See ya in a few weeks!
“Symbiotes”
Stoneware, underglaze, black copper oxide, fabric, smoke, memory
2025
It was never really a vacuum to me. It was alive. It breathed, ate, moved, responded to touch, slept in the closet, and I could ride it. It set the carpet on fire a few times when I wasn’t quite big enough to vacuum but determined enough to try. Even now, I can’t quite convince myself that it was never alive. Maybe now, in a kind of self portrait, it’s immortal in more than just my mind. 🤍
#ceramic #amaco #amacovelvetunderglaze #underglaze #trompeloeil #sculpture #ceramicsculpture #mfa #vcuarts #clay #art #memory #childhood #painting #selfportrait #craft
