Red Lodge Clay Center – Short-Term Resident (ASPN) 2026
Nat Stasiukiewicz began working with ceramics in 2020 in his sophomore year at Newsome High School with a semester-long Beginning Ceramics course. He continued this trajectory by taking the year-long Intermediate and Advanced Ceramics courses in his Junior and Senior years of high school.
After graduating high school in 2022, he began working towards a Bachelor of Arts degree at the University of South Florida where he continued to work primarily with Ceramics. In this time, he also explored other mediums such as Film and Printmaking.
After developing a body of work over his two years at USF, he applied to transfer to the Rhode Island School of Design’s Ceramics department in 2024 and was accepted. After spending the following summer in RISD’s Summer Experimental and Foundational Studies, he started his studies in the Ceramics Department as a Sophomore and is currently a Junior.
My work spans large-scale coil-built architectural sculptures, detailed collectable figures, and narratively illustrated pottery. Across these forms runs a constant thread: the experience of “otherness” shaped by my transgender identity and bicultural Japanese-American upbringing. I often merge both human and animal forms with alien features, drawing on a dreamlike surreality that creates an atmosphere of uncanniness and a sense of slipping out of control. I explore the role of architecture as boundary, distinguishing the holy from the unholy, and its ability to represent the pitifully unattainable. With warped perspectives and repetition, I depict an intangible world that is wholly real to only myself.
By allowing agency and symbolism to my animals and objects, I challenge the attribute of superior personhood that is often given to humans to distinguish them from other entities – both sentient and insentient. I create to simultaneously unsettle and comfort – not only in regards to an audience, but also myself – in an effort to understand and find meaning in the fragility of the architecture of the self.