ALBERO: What drew you to your current artistic style or medium? What drew you to working with natural materials and organic forms in your practice?
Mikee: As someone who settled quickly and comfortably into hand building after I started pottery, clay really functions as a sculpture body for me. Learning the nuances of a clay body’s capabilities depending on its moisture level and physical composition stirs experimentation in my work and is a never-ending endeavor to master.
Trips to the palengke and just driving around Sorsogon, where handicraft and tool-making are abundant, are central to my respect for natural and indigenous materials.
A: What themes or emotions do you often explore through your work?
M: A lot of fluid forms that emanate what I experience in my adventures. Recently I'm drawn to cavernous flowing qualities produced by erosion. I like contemplating the scale of time as it shows up in our present world through stones, terrain, flora.
A: What inspires your creative process—are there particular places, memories, or feelings that spark ideas for you?
M: Living in a place where I'm enmeshed in lush, rugged landscapes, something always catches my attention - rocks, driftwood, leaves. I'm interested in how movement - eruptions, currents, erosion - shapes these things over time. I'm also inspired by the works of sculptors like JB Blunk, Isamu Noguchi, Simone Bodmer-Turner - people who often worked across different media and deal with a range of scales from objects to architectural space.
A: How do you choose your color palettes or forms?
M: For me it's a function of material at hand. I'm only beginning to experiment with glazes to get more texture and complexity onto the surface of my pots.. As that's going on, I like to use form to achieve different shadows and textures on my pieces without the use of glaze.
A: What was your inspiration for the River Rock Handles and why?
M: I thought the groggy, white clay I'm using would be a great textural and color contrast to the smooth wood of the furniture. As the name suggests, they're inspired by the fluid qualities of stones found in river beds, eroded by flowing water. I've been given many special memories walking down rivers with beautiful stones, and this was an ode to that.