ARTIST BIO
Born in Beaumont, Texas, and based in Houston, Amanda Barry Jones is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice centers on ceramics, sculpture, and the expressive possibilities of glaze. Her work explores layered surfaces, luminous glazes, and forms inspired by the natural world.
Jones earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Ceramics from Lamar University before receiving a full scholarship to Houston Christian University (formerly Houston Baptist University), where she earned a Master of Fine Arts with an emphasis in Sculpture and Ceramics.
She maintains an active studio practice, regularly exhibiting throughout Texas and completing public art commissions. Jones has taught since 2014 and currently serves as Head of the Art Department and Art Gallery at Galveston College. Alongside her studio practice, she is committed to fostering creative communities through teaching, mentorship, curatorial work, and public engagement.
ARTIST STATEMENT
My work explores transformation through clay, glaze, heat, and the atmospheric effects of reduction firing. Working primarily in ceramic sculpture and wall forms, I create imagined landscapes inhabited by animal presences and traces of human experience. Drawing from the natural world without depicting specific places, these environments exist somewhere between memory and imagination, where earth, sky, and cosmos converge.
Glaze is both my material and my image-making process. I use layered glazes to build atmosphere, depth, and movement rather than simply as surface decoration. Heat, gravity, and chemistry become active participants, allowing imagery to emerge through flowing surfaces, subtle interactions, and unexpected shifts during firing. Years of testing, layering, and refining glaze combinations have shaped a practice grounded in intention yet open to discovery.
Animals recur throughout my work as suggestive presences, while human experience emerges through gesture, form, and atmosphere. I create spaces that encourage viewers to look closely and consider the space between movement and stillness, the familiar and the unknown. Ultimately, my work seeks to evoke contemplation, curiosity, and wonder about our relationship to the natural world.