Paul Briggs

Paul Samuel Briggs was born in Beacon, NY and grew up in the Hudson Valley area of New York state. He was one of those kids who doodled all the time, enrolled in various art classes and began working with clay as a 9th grader. Ceramics quickly became the one place where his attention was not disturbed. His affinity for pinch- forming clay developed while the art director of a summer camp in Bushkill, PA. His thinking about art objects as material shapes with meaning began as an undergraduate at the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University. Over his circuitous life journey Paul has studied and taught education, ceramics, and theology, earning his PhD at the Pennsylvania State University and his MFA at the Massachusetts College of Art, Boston, MA.

Paul works primarily with pinch-forming and slab building processes and overall his work is about art making as inner development, broadly understood. He creates distinctive, high relief pinch-formed ceramic vessels and penetrating slab-built sculptural forms, both genres often have interior space. Paul resides in Springfield, MA with his partner making a life, art, ceramics, sewing, quilting, and thinking about how far away their three children live.