I usually say too much about everything. I would like to make simple statements, but I enjoy embellishment, exaggeration and variation too much to ever succeed. Instead of trying to explain the commonalities between my ceramics and prints — the way my two-dimensional work informs my three-dimensional work — I would prefer to let the associations and relationships between the ceramics and the prints be discovered by viewers through their own ingenuity and common sense.

Perhaps it is enough to say that I work continuously on both my prints and ceramics and have constant anxieties about the way they develop on their own and the way they do or do not relate to each other. In both the 2D and 3D work, I enter the studio without any pre-conception of what is going to happen, but let my activity, process and experience be my inspiration. It is impossible for me to re-create older work and just as impossible to predict what will be happening in the studio a week from today.

There are some constants in my work: an interest in pattern, decorative elements, multi-cultural history, the vessel, narratives, surface richness, horror vacui, invention. These ideas, rather than specific themes, unify my two- and three-dimensional work.

My current series of prints, the Imaginary Vase, depicts vessels that could not be built in ceramics — forms that are too complex, too improbable, too free. Though intentionally impossible, they have the authenticity and vitality of real objects. My drawings on atlas maps overlay invented vessel forms onto real geographies, creating a conversation between place and imagination that began during a residency in France when I found an old atlas available for collage work.

— Frank Ozereko