"Dehmie Dehmlow grew up in Denver, Colorado. She makes pottery and mixed media modular sculptures that tell stories using layers of color and texture, found materials, ceramics, and other fabricated objects. She loves to teach ceramics and sculpture. In addition to artistic work, Dehmie’s background is in caregiving for elderly and adults with disabilities. She earned her BA in Ceramics and Pre-Medical Sciences from Colorado State University. Dehmie was a ceramics intern at Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Colorado before she was selected as the 2019 Salad Days Artist in Residence at Watershed Center for Ceramic Arts in Maine. Dehmie then completed a Post-Baccalaureate program at Louisiana State University. She received her MFA from University of Nebraska-Lincoln. After her MFA Dehmie was selected as the 2022-2023 Artist in Residence at PrattMunson Art Institute in Utica, New York. She is currently the ceramic artist in residence at Lawrence Arts Center in Lawrence, KS. Dehmie enjoys being outside with her dog, Hadlee, and observing the world and people around her."

300 Word Artist Statement

My work is empowered by intuition and imagination and is based in storytelling. I build sculptures and pottery using a strong compositional and formal sensibility as a guide. My practice as an interdisciplinary artist making modular sculpture engages in thought processes that deploy forms of reclamation. My assemblages emphasize potential as a form of agency and vitality. Potential is held in the unformed clay, salvaged materials, fragmented objects, and fabricated components I collect, transform, and create. I imagine a new collaborative life with these parts, using them to fill needs within the whole of a sculpture. Precarious relationships and implied function create moments of familiarity and play. The care and attention I give to each material is a declaration of value. My work hinges on inviting people to think differently about materials and their function. Ideally, this alternative way of thinking leads a viewer to rediscover their own reality.

Often my work takes off from moments of experiencing decaying architectural structures. Their details directly inform my work and are often repeated and abstracted in the surfaces and forms of my pots. These moments exist as space for reciprocal moments of buoyancy. These architectural structures and I, skinned in emotive layers of texture, carry our aging is a record. Suspended in time we float, embracing the volume, and weight of what has been built up and broken down. This accumulation, a form of growth. We exist with the ability to crumble, grasping at final shreds of life. These moments become a unit of my survival that can be mobilized.

In positions of desperation and urgency we can be driven to work with our reality, imagining a new existence for the abject. When faced with a state of loss, ruin, scarcity, and/or oppression, our tenacity to adapt, reach, grab, and rebuild is miraculous and almost incomprehensible.

There is wonder and desperation in what becomes a building block and where we find material and immaterial bricks to lay.