Musings in Clay

Briggs has sustained this remarkable stamina throughout his creative life. Growing up in New York’s Hudson Valley, he took his first ceramics class in high school, eventually enrolled at the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University, earned his MFA from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, where he also studied metalworking and woodworking, and gained a PhD in art education at Penn State. Today, while cultivating his own practice, he teaches in the ceramics department at Alfred, instilling in his students the values of discipline and slowness that have been foundational to his craft.

His favored processes have worked in tandem to help him maintain momentum over the years. Pinch-forming—the use of steady, methodical pinching to stretch and shape a singular ball of clay—“quiets my mind,” Briggs says. “It absorbs me. I have to get into a certain mind space to be able to slow down and really pay attention to the details.”

Hours of this meticulous work, sometimes involving as much as 10 pounds of clay, yield the pieces he is perhaps best known for: elegant vessels covered in rows of furled leaves, as if caught mid-twirl in an autumn breeze. They reflect his close, ongoing study of nature’s rhythms and forms (pine cones, flowers, sea anemones) and his sensitivity to beauty found in the everyday.

Cell Personae also reflects Briggs’s care for and deep investment in community, which grew during his tenure as a Baptist pastor from 2004 to 2014. At Antioch Baptist Church in Bedford Hills, New York—a historically Black congregation founded in 1894—he expanded youth programs and organized art events such as quilting and theater productions. During this period, he also helped establish an organization for unhoused people and taught a media literacy course at a women’s correctional facility.

Though Briggs paused his studio practice to initially commit himself to ministry, over time he found a renewed relationship with art that has shaped his studio work ever since. “It was while I was a pastor that artmaking became my primary spiritual practice—that is, it provided me with quiet meditative moments,” Briggs says. “Eventually, I found that it was the only practice that brought the ‘brain chatter’ under control.”

During the early years of the COVID pandemic, the clarity and sense of direction that art offered—the chase, as Briggs might say—was disrupted. He experienced health complications and found it difficult to home in on his ideas. “I was kind of lost for a little while, I just couldn’t find my way,” he says. “I became very unsure of things, and I wasn’t able to make work that was true to myself.”

He tried for two years to make additional Cell Personae but couldn’t get the work off the ground, encountering false start after false start. He realized that the idea of the prison industrial complex had, in some ways, been consuming him, and that he needed to shift course. “I always said I’m the most reluctant social-justice artist because that work is really hard on the psyche,” Briggs says. “But I’m compelled by society to make those pieces. I can’t not make that work, which is so much a part of my daily experience.”

Another recent series explores Briggs’s preoccupations with gravity—specifically, how this universal interaction between masses can be a metaphor for control and agency. “There are forces in our life that are irresistible, and we can only be affected by them,” he says. Using slabs, he builds dark, totem-like sculptures with gaping apertures, from which emerge jumbles of coils painstakingly pulled into knots to tether the slab work. More than a foot tall and slightly off-kilter, the pieces have a palpable precarity; they seem pulled in different directions and on the verge of release.

Gravity, as the series is titled, is about perseverance in the face of unrelenting forces and the possibilities of freedom in spite of constraints. It is a continuation of Briggs’s interest in people’s inner lives and systems that govern them, but it’s also an exercise of his own freedom: He’s making art that feels close to what he’s always wanted to make.

Briggs tries to impart that sense of inner orientation, the honoring of one’s own motivations above all, to his students, who are typically young artists trying to find success in a competitive and fast-paced environment. “I try to get them to see that there is another plateau—not another award, exhibition, or sale—but another plateau within yourself that is closer to your self-realization than you’ve been in the past,” Briggs says. “Art is a wayof developing our internal selves.” It’s a challenging, lifelong journey, and not always a clear one. But for Briggs, the work an artist truly longs for will always return to the mind’s eye if one remains intentional—and one will feel it when it does. “My work is getting quiet again, and I’m glad about it,” he says. “I look over and I’m just like, ‘OK, whew. That’s a lot more soothing.’”

Claire Voon is a writer and critic based in New York City and a frequent contributor to American Craft.