About the Artist

Debra Meadow comes to ceramic art from a background in drawing and painting. She earned a Certificate in Drawing, with a concentration in ceramics, from Oregon College of Art and Craft in 1997. After a couple of decades, her paintings began to push out into the third dimension, with wooden cutouts and shaped wire extending beyond the picture plane. That’s when she returned to handbuilding ceramics. She brings her meticulous painter’s eye for line, form, and color to her clay forms and a loose, some might say childlike, sense of play to her drawings on the ceramic surface.

Debra’s studio sits on the banks of the McKenzie River, east of Eugene, providing a never ending source of inspiration and calm.

Artist Statement

When I was a child, I wasn’t allowed to have a pair of sandals, so I made a pair from my father’s shirt cardboard. They lasted as long as I could walk from one end of the house to the other, but from that project, my lifelong fascination with creating objects from raw materials – with mainly my hands as tools – was born. 

Trained as a painter, I have a love of color and dynamic composition and I bring those to my work with clay. Each piece, whether a simple bowl or a complex sculpture, is a composition that is pleasing from every angle, even the back.

I have a mind that travels quickly from idea to idea. Most of my work is one-of-a-kind because once it’s made, it sparks a new idea or variation and I’m off again on a journey to find the most perfect combination of balance, beauty and joy I can find. When I am not in my studio, my hands itch to push and pull clay; when I am in my studio, I’m at my most “me.” When a patron owns a piece of my work, we’re connected across the miles and years. Art is connection.