Press kit

Dirt Creature is the ceramic and mixed-media sculpture practice of Richard Ward, working off-grid in southern Arizona.

Working with clay, minerals, rawhide and found metal, Richard explores how we are shaped by experience, how we adapt, and how we hold together over time. Materials bring histories of their own into the work, from geological processes to the previous lives of discarded objects.

His current series, Holding, explores how we hold ourselves together and how we are held by the world around us.

Richard Ward is the artist behind Dirt Creature, a ceramic and mixed-media sculpture practice rooted in the question of how to belong to the earth.

Working with clay, minerals, rawhide and found metal, he brings materials with different histories into relationships that can be tender, uneasy or unresolved. Discarded objects find new lives without losing the traces of what they have been through. A vessel can become a way to recognize something of ourselves.

His current series, Holding, explores how we hold ourselves together and how we are held by the world around us. Some forms open from within. Others carry an outside weight or depend on a delicate support. Through these encounters, he considers how circumstances shape us, how we adapt, and how we live with what does not resolve.

For Richard, making is a way of paying attention and feeling connected to something larger. Clay connects him to a human practice stretching back some 30,000 years, while the materials themselves carry geological histories measured in millions of years. He hopes the work offers a moment of recognition, a little happiness, or curiosity about our place among the things around us.

I’m drawn to working with things I can touch and feel the weight of. Clay, minerals, weathered iron, rawhide. Working with these materials has taught me to slow down and pay attention. Each has its own possibilities and limits, and making begins with getting to know them.

Working with clay connects me to a human practice stretching back some 30,000 years. Taking materials into our hands and creating something that might remain after us. I think about the possibility that something I make could last for thousands of years, while bringing someone a little happiness today.

The materials carry histories much older than our own. Clay and minerals are part of a geological story measured in millions of years. Found metal carries more recent traces of use, weather and neglect. By the time something reaches my studio, it has already been through a great deal. I get to take part in what happens next.

My sculptures grow from these encounters. I follow what happens as materials meet, resist, yield and change. They give me a way to think about how we are shaped by what we experience, how we adapt, and how we live with what remains unresolved.

Making this work helps me understand how to belong to the earth. I hope it stirs that same curiosity in others about the materials around us, the histories they carry, and our place among them.

I make artifacts for a species trying to remember how to belong to the earth.