David Hicks, 'Poly Shrub', 2023, Glazed ceramic, ©David Hicks / Photo by Robert Wedemeyer
David Hicks is an artist and educator who lives and works in his hometown of Visalia, California. He received a BFA in Ceramic Arts from California State University Long Beach (2003) and an MFA in Ceramics from Alfred University, New York (2006).
Hicks creates hand-built earthenware sculptures in a myriad of evocative agrarian forms – thorny petaled artichokes and budding pomegranates, long-husked corn plants and slim bean pods, striated gourds and cut branches. His ceramics are glazed with dynamic applications, some mottled and layered, others bubbling and dripping.
"Why is it that I’m drawn to the forms in the garden and the forms in the fields that surround my home? They are the visual dialect of my region."