Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Ceramics, sculpture, textiles
Website: erikscollon.com
Erik Scollon was born in Rochester, Michigan. He received a BFA from Albion College before moving to the Bay Area, where he earned an MFA in Ceramics and an MA in Visual and Critical Studies, both from California College of the Arts. He lives and works in San Francisco, California.
Since his first solo exhibition, The Urge, at Romer Young Gallery in 2010, Scollon has become one of the gallery’s longest-represented artists, returning with solo shows roughly every few years, including A Moment Lasts Forever Until It’s Gone (2013), And/Both (2016), Object Choice (2019), Anything with a Hole… Is Also a Bead (2022, shown concurrently at the di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art in Napa), and Looking for a Lover (2024). Earlier in his career, his work was included in Yerba Buena Center for the Arts’ Bay Area Now 5 (2008), and he has held artist residencies at Recology San Francisco (2017), Albion College, and the Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts in Maine.
Scollon is an Associate Professor and Chair of the First Year CORE Studio Program at California College of the Arts, and has also taught in UC Berkeley’s Department of Art Practice. Collaboration runs through his practice: he co-founded the ceramics-and-performance collective The Brick Factory with Nicole Burisch, Tom Myers, and Summer Zickefoose, and co-produces the artist-run publication Color&Color with Amanda Curreri.
Scollon reworks the histories and hierarchies of ceramics, moving between porcelain and stoneware, high fire and low fire, functional object and sculpture, to interrogate taste, class, gender, and queerness. Early bodies of work upended the genteel associations of blue-and-white porcelain and color-saturated hobby glazes through performative and participatory projects; more recent work, born of pandemic-era isolation, is built from thousands of individually hand-rolled, pierced, fired, and glazed ceramic beads, strung and knotted with paracord into large macramé wall panels that blur the line between painting, sculpture, and craft.
Across scales, from wheel-thrown porcelain mugs to monumental beaded compositions, Scollon treats objects as sites of embodied relation rather than fixed things, describing his interest in experiences that have “duration, beginnings and endings” and can therefore remain “flexible and change.” Recurring motifs — decals drawn from 1990s queer publications, charred wood, and survivalist paracord paired with domestic macramé — hold together dualities of intimacy and toughness, decoration and conceptual rigor, throughout a practice that spans gallery sculpture, functional pottery, and durational performance.
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