Biography
Tyler Mickschl is a ceramic artist whose sculptural practice explores tension, growth, and structural connection through hand-built and wheel thrown clay forms. Working primarily in stoneware, Tyler creates sculptures that reference organic systems and bodily forms while resisting literal representation. His work emphasizes process, surface, and the physical dialogue between parts, often allowing forms to merge, fracture, or resolve through pressure rather than symmetry. Tyler’s practice is grounded in material investigation, and makes choices based on current emotions, and as a response to the clay as he builds. He examines how instability, compression, and convergence generate meaning within form. His work reflects an ongoing inquiry into transformation and endurance, shaped by risk-taking and sustained engagement with clay as both a structural and expressive medium.
Artist Statement
My work reflects a life shaped by endurance movement and slow transformation. I build intuitively responding to the clay – pushing gesture, tension, and texture until the piece arrives at its own chorus. I continue to challenge myself through ambitious forms and evolving techniques, letting each piece become a record of growth and tension that shapes my own personal journey. I am interested in moments where parts merge unexpectedly, where instability becomes necessary for cohesion. Rather than pursuing a singular ideal form, I treat each piece as a site of negotiation, between control and collapse, intention and material response, where meaning is shaped by what the structure is forced to become. The surface retains traces of touch, erosion, and resistance, functioning as evidence of time spent wrestling form into presence. These works are not conclusions, but markers within an ongoing process of learning, and persistence, and attentive making.
Vertical No. 4
mid-fired stoneware and glazes
24”h x 20”w x 18”d
2025
NFS