Jodi Cutler
ARTIST + EDUCATOR :: AUSTIN, TEXAS

Photo: Bernadette Castillo Photography
Interdisciplinary artist working primarily in ceramics, sculpture, and installation.
Profile
My practice explores change, accumulation, adaptation, and the evidence transformation leaves behind. Through repeated forms, stacked and bound structures, atmospheric firing, and site-responsive work, I investigate how objects, people, and places change in relationship to one another.
My background in art, education, design, and systems thinking informs a process grounded in experimentation, emergence, participation, and uncertainty.
My work explores what happens when we allow objects, places, and ourselves to change.
Artist's Statement
I make sculptural ceramic forms and installations that investigate growth, accumulation, adaptation, and the evidence left behind by change. The work is often built in parts: stacked, bound, repeated, balanced, or gathered. Individual forms may appear pod-like, architectural, bodily, or vaguely familiar without resolving into a specific thing. I am interested in that space of recognition, when something feels known before we can name it.
My process begins with curiosity rather than a predetermined outcome. I make, respond, reorganize, and make again. Forms accumulate. Systems emerge. Something that begins chaotically may develop structure. Something carefully organized may be disrupted. I think of making as a way of finding out what I am thinking.
Increasingly, I am interested in what happens when the work leaves the studio and enters the landscape. Rather than treating the environment as a backdrop for sculpture, I want place to become an active participant in the work. Clay weathers. Surfaces stain. Plants grow around forms. Insects may inhabit them. Pieces shift, collect debris, disappear, and reappear. Human touch becomes another form of weather.
These changes are not damage to be prevented. They are part of the work.
I am particularly drawn to collections of objects that alter our relationship to a place: things discovered along a path, clustered in grass, stacked beside a tree, or encountered where they seem simultaneously intentional and out of place. Their scale often invites proximity. Rather than confronting the viewer as monuments, they ask someone to come closer, to notice a groove, run a hand across a surface, rearrange something, or simply wonder why it is there.
My current sculptural work traces a recurring sequence: emergence, chaos, organization, integration, and giving. I do not understand these as fixed stages or a linear progression. They are states we move through repeatedly. Growth is less a march toward completion than an ongoing process of assembling, losing, adapting, and reorganizing.
Ceramics is especially important to this inquiry because clay carries evidence. Pressure remains. Fire records transformation. Wood, ash, atmosphere, oxides, and glaze leave marks that I can influence but never completely control. I am drawn to firing processes that preserve this negotiation between intention and circumstance. The finished object is therefore not a conclusion. It is a record of what has already happened and a material capable of continuing to change.
That idea extends beyond clay. Binding, fiber, found material, drawing, repetition, and installation allow me to explore connection and impermanence in different ways. A knot can hold separate objects together without making them permanent. A repeated form can become a population. An object placed outdoors can slowly become inseparable from the place that contains it.
I am less interested in preserving objects unchanged than in creating conditions for continued transformation. What happens to a thing matters to me as much as how it begins.
The evidence remains while our relationship to it changes.
CV
EDUCATION
1994
Pratt Institute
BFA, Art & Design Education. Brooklyn, New York
SELECTED EXHIBITS + EVENTS
2026, 2025
Greater Austin Clay Association Studio Tour
Austin, TX
2024, 2023, 2019, 2018
Austin Pottery Student Show
Austin, TX
2026, 2019
Greater Austin Studio Tour
Austin, TX
STUDIO PRACTICE
2014 to now
Independent studio practice
Austin, Texas. Ceramics, sculpture, drawing, painting, printmaking, fiber, and mixed media.
TEACHING
2022-2026
University Lecturer - Collaboration.
UT School of Design and Creative Technologies Design in Health
2003-2006
University Lecturer - Structures in Information Architecture
ArtCenter College of Art, Pasadena CA
DIGITAL DESIGN (select 1995-2026)
2022-2026
H-E-B Digital
Senior Director of Digital Design Austin, TX
2006-2022
IBM
Design Principal Boston, MA + Austin, TX
1995-2006
Early Stage Startups & Independent Consulting
San Francisco CA, Los Angeles CA, Providence RI