about me
Caitlin McIver is a Seattle-based ceramic sculptor whose work explores themes of vulnerability, protection, and transformation through imagined creatures. Her hand-built forms—often soft, spiny, and unsettling—reflect emotional and bodily experiences. Raised in Tampa, Caitlin holds a Master of Industrial Design from Pratt Institute and a Bachelor of Environmental Design (Architecture) from University of Colorado at Boulder. After working in design, she shifted to ceramics in Seattle, where she now teaches, maintains a studio practice, and works as a studio technician. Caitlin is currently a Resident Artist at Seward Park Clay Studio, where she continues to explore the intersection of personal experience and materiality in her sculptures.
artist statement
I create imagined ceramic creatures that embody emotional and physical tension, exploring themes of protection, vulnerability, fertility, and transformation. These beings sit at the intersection of beauty and discomfort—soft and sharp, alluring and unsettling—reflecting the contradictory and layered nature of the human experience.
In the last couple years, I’ve focused on structural intricacy and expressive form to convey inner tensions. More recently, I’ve shifted toward a slower, more meditative process that prioritizes repetition and surface design. I coil-build hollow forms, then add hundreds of individual attachments layered with pattern, glaze, and increasingly, contrasting materials. I’ve begun incorporating new clay bodies, underglaze, cold finishes, and soft elements like needle felting to introduce texture, bodily association, and material tension.
These shifts in form and process echo changes in my personal life: navigating transitions, questioning future possibilities, and reckoning with how past experiences have shaped my sense of safety and intimacy. Repetition, for me, is sometimes soothing, sometimes a push through difficulty. The work becomes a physical way to process what’s intangible—a gesture toward understanding myself and how I relate to others.
I want these pieces to provoke curiosity while holding an edge of discomfort, drawing viewers in with the familiar, then unsettling them with the strange. In doing so, I hope to hold space for contradiction, and to invite others to consider the multitudes within themselves.
To see my current CV, click here.
To view past design work, click here.