Portrait of Tempest with pots

Ceramic artist and educator in Ann Arbor, making sculptural objects that aren't complete until you add a plant.

I first worked with clay at 12, when I decided my first project should be a teapot. It didn’t work, but nonetheless, I was hooked.

I followed a meandering artistic path, but always found myself returning to clay. Even when I wasn’t working in clay directly, my interests pushed me toward the tactile and textured. In graduate school, for example, I made collaged, place-based landscapes on handmade three-dimensional paper forms.

When my family returned to Ann Arbor in 2016, I joined a community ceramics studio, and those ideas about landscape and surface gradually found their way back into clay. I became interested in vessels as collaborations: the object isn’t finished until someone brings it into their home and decides what to put in it.

That led me to planters, and eventually to bonsai containers—modern vessels designed to support a tree while creating a landscape of their own.

At the end of 2025, I took the plunge and became a full-time teaching artist and potter. I work and teach primarily out of Yourist Studio in Ann Arbor, although I also teach and make work in other spaces throughout the area.

  • I’m drawn to the quiet relationship between place and landscape, not just as a physical location, but as something remembered, felt, and carried.

    My process is experimental and responsive. I often begin with a location, an observation, or a memory rooted in nature, and then work in response to the material, allowing each mark to shift the direction of the piece. Clay holds memory; each gesture, pause, and decision remains present in the surface, so the material carries both process and time. I leave those marks visible. The finished forms are a bit wild, a bit organic. They are fully functional, but also sculptural objects in themselves.

    Plants complete the picture. These pots nod to landscape, and the plant brings them into balance, introducing growth, change, and time. The work becomes a collaboration: first between material and maker, and then with the person who chooses how to live with and complete the piece.

  • Tempest NeuCollins holds a BFA from Pacific Northwest College of Art (Portland, OR) and an MFA in Studio Art from the School of Visual Arts (New York City), where her focus shifted toward abstraction and mark-making across media. Now based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, she works out of the Yourist Studio ceramic community.

    Select Exhibitions

    • We are the Guild, Gutman Gallery (2026)

    • Varied Vessels, Ann Arbor Art Center, Ann Arbor, MI (2025)

    • Collaborative bonsai piece with Michael Abbot, Ann Arbor Bonsai Society Show, Matthaei Botanical Gardens, Ann Arbor, MI (2024)

    • PowerArt! Public Art Program, vinyl wrap installation, Hands-On Museum, Ann Arbor, MI (2018–present)

    • Michigan 'Scapes, Second Museum, Brighton, MI (2018)

    • Works on Paper III, Jeffrey Leder Gallery, Long Island City, NY (2014)

    • Of Place and Landscape, Space Object (2014)

    • Into the Vortex, NARS Gallery, Brooklyn, NY (2014)

    • Grey Matter, The Painting Center, New York, NY (2011)

    • Exit, SVA Gallery, New York, NY (2011)

    • The Great Disruption, Rayko Photo Center, San Francisco, CA (2009)

    Awards & Residencies

    • 1st Place, Ann Arbor Woman Artists (2018)

    • SVA Alumni Grant Recipient (2011)

    • Artist Residency, Rancho Linda Vista, Oracle, AZ (2014)