David Hicks, 'Poly Shrub', 2023, Glazed ceramic, ©David Hicks / Photo by Robert Wedemeyer
"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."
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. His ceramics and paintings draw inspiration from nature and agricultural products and examine the formal qualities of plans and organic forms common to the American landscape. The shapes and themes he references in his practice are rooted in the fields and agricultural community surrounding his home. These organic and sometimes mechanical forms are often allegories for the human condition.
David Hicks' work is a part of the collection of the American Museum of Ceramic Art in Pomona, California and was included in Wayfinding, Craft Contemporary’s third clay biennial in Los Angeles (2023); More Clay: The Power of Repetition, curated by Rebecca Cross, American University Art Museum, Washington DC (2022); and Think Pinker, curated by Beth Rudin DeWoody, GAVLAK, Los Angeles, CA (2023). Hicks has presented recent solo exhibitions with Diane Rosenstein Gallery, Los Angeles, and Mindy Solomon, Miami.