Website: https://ericjager.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/e.jager/
Biography
Eric Jager is a ceramic artist and educator from Fairbanks, Alaska. He received an MFA in Studio Art from Syracuse University and a BFA in Ceramics from the University of South Alabama. Jager has taught ceramics and sculpture at both the university and secondary school levels. His practice explores the relationship between natural systems and industrial infrastructure through atmospheric-fired functional and sculptural ceramics.
Artist Statement
Growing up in Fairbanks, Alaska, I was shaped by a persistent visual tension: expansive, unaltered landscapes interrupted by industrial infrastructure, pipelines cutting through river valleys, factories set against mountain ranges. This coexistence of natural and constructed systems continues to anchor my work, where erosion, irregularity, and organic growth meet imposed structure and control.
My ceramic practice investigates this friction through vessels that move between functional and sculptural. Working across wheel-thrown and hand-built processes, I alter forms through carving, piercing, and deformation, pushing them beyond utility into objects that register stress, imbalance, and adaptation. I am particularly drawn to atmospheric firing, where flame, salt, and kiln dynamics act as collaborators. These conditions produce surfaces that resist full control, instead accumulating evidence of time, heat, and environment.
Process is not only a means of construction but a way of thinking. Physical engagements of making, such as wedging, throwing, and carving, become a method for testing material limits and possibilities. Through piercing and the creation of negative space, I disrupt the solidity of the vessel to explore the relationship between mass and void, allowing light and air to activate the form. These voids reference both erosion in natural landscapes and apertures in manmade structures, emphasizing absence as an active element.
Rather than work toward replication or production, I approach each piece as part of an evolving investigation. The vessel serves as a familiar starting point, but one that I distort, fragment, and reconfigure to test relationships between stability and fragility, containment and exposure, organic and mechanical.
Ultimately, I aim to create objects that hold a visible record of their making. Surfaces marked by human touch, atmospheric conditions, and structural intervention invite close examination and physical engagement. In this way, the work centers knowledge gained through direct engagement with material, what is learned through the human hand, through resistance, and through process, grounding experience in the tension between organic and imposed structures.
Convergent Boundaries VII
Salt Fired Stoneware
28”h x 26”w x 6.5”d
2025
$1800
Growth Cup III
Salt Fired Stoneware
6”h x 6”w x 5”d
2025
$130