Linda
Sikora

Linda Sikora was born in Canada to the son of immigrant parents whose family left Eastern Europe as political tides turned. Canadian born, Sikora’s mother was the oldest of fourteen. Grade school education was a luxury for her parents, but the values of personal agency and industry were abundant. Today, she resides with her family (husband and daughter) near Alfred, NY, where she has an active studio practice and is a professor in Ceramic Art at Alfred University. Impressed by the furniture her father built and her mother’s acute sense of space, color, and pattern, the genre of functional ceramics became her primary practice through an education in art, craft, and design.

Service, storage, and display are platforms for culture and behavior. To serve (engage, offer), to store (hold, remember), and to display (share, invite) are gestures that are scalable. These gestures occur in close proximity at individual, private, household, and large-scale societal levels. Service, storage, and display are the conceptual underpinnings of ceramic subjects, such as teapot, cup, pitcher, and jar. Far from neutral, meaningfully made objects influence attention and action, and ultimately, how we stretch our imagination to know a broader world of conditions that are large and abstract, such as time. For example, consider a teapot that is “performative” over finite durations (until the tea is drained), and the storage jar, where stillness and silence actively hold for durations longer than a life.

Portrait photo by Alfred University Photographer.