Today we’d like to introduce you to April DeConick.
Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
Whenever people ask me how long I’ve been an artist, I always pause. Where to start? Was there ever I time I wasn’t making things? If there was, I don’t remember it. I have always made things. But that is too long of a story.
My professional career as an artist started six years ago during COVID when I decided that my art career was now or never. I rented a studio at Sawyer Yards and began making art to sell for the first time in my life. I leaned into my background in fiber, textiles, and clay which I had loved in college. I began making with an intensity that even surprised me.
Early on there was a juncture in my life when I had to chose between an MFA program and a PhD program (to study the history and literature of early Christianity). I followed the PhD dream. Most of my adult life has been devoted to teaching, researching, and writing about how Christianity got started in the Roman Empire. I’m a specialist in early Christian mysticism and gnosticism, fascinated with how people imagine and interact with the sacred aspects of their lives. I’m a professor at Rice University in the Department of Religion.
The decision to nurture another dimension of my life – to become a professional artist too – was a response to the existential crisis that many of us experienced during COVID. I gave myself permission to seriously create art before it’s too late.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
It’s been a relatively smooth road for me since I don’t have the pressure of earning my living from selling my artworks. I can make what I want when I want.
That said, the learning curve has been steep since I wasn’t networked into the art community via the normal routes. I haven’t taken coursework in art since my early college days and that was back in Michigan where I grew up. Basically I didn’t know anyone and I wasn’t plugged into the art scene in Houston. But I found a friendly crowd at Sawyer Yards who have been kind, helpful, supportive, and inspiring. I don’t think I could have done any of this without that creative community and space. It’s been a perfect fit for me. The opportunities that have opened up for me there have been numerous (exhibitions, direct sales, visibility, and more). For instance, Sawyer Yards hosted two solo exhibitions of my works, one in 2023 (Flow Meets Fiber) and one in 2025-26 (Clay, Thread, and Wonder). I love having Open Studios every Second Saturday and visiting with customers, many who have become my friends now.
On a related note: I am still trying to find my target audience since I’m not as interested in creating functional pottery as I am in creating larger sculptural vessels. My fiber pieces aren’t functional rugs either, but fabulous designer wall sculptures. The gallery scene seems difficult for artists to enter if you aren’t already known in certain art circles. How you expand nationally into gallery spaces is still a mystery to me. Social media hasn’t been particularly helpful. I have some pieces in The Ardest Gallery in The Woodlands and this year I was successful entering the Affordable Art Fair Houston as a participant in an artist collective. These feel like the art arenas where my work makes the most sense, but it’s an ongoing guessing game for me. Trial and error mostly. Hoping someone will notice the potential of my work and get it in front of the right people: interior designers, gallery owners, and other art professionals.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
I’m a scholar of mysticism and a maker of spirited things you can touch and hold. As a ceramicist and fiber artist — and a longtime professor of religious studies — I move between two disciplines most people keep separate: the study of how humans imagine the sacred aspects of life, and the physical work of making objects that embody that spirit. My abstractions reflect blooming, flowing, and emergence: art made to express the inexpressible wonder of coming into being.
“Simply spirited” is the phrase that describes the core of my practice. My approach is rooted in movement — the sweep of my arm, the press of my hand, the rhythm of my body becomes integral to the finished work. My gestural ceramics and fiber works preserve this immediacy, holding what I calls “the trace of touch”: a record of presence and becoming, carrying a spirited movement that language and technology can’t reproduce.
Rooted in a deep love of natural materials and today’s revival of Arts and Crafts values, my way of making connects me to generations of makers — especially the women who shaped the early Arts and Crafts movement — and to contemporary efforts to imagine more sustainable, humane ways of living.
Across all mediums, I’m drawn to the aesthetics of care — what might be called hygge — and to craft traditions long undervalued in the fine art world, reclaiming these materials and methods as vital, contemporary tools for meaning-making beyond language.
I see my work as part of a broader cultural “progressive nostalgia”: a longing not to return to the past, but to carry forward what was most humane within it — integrity, sustainability, and the joy of handmade objects — into a future shaped by new tools, new communities, and new possibilities.
Through my work, I contribute to the ongoing revaluation of craft as a discipline of transformation and a future-shaping practice, rooted in authenticity and regional design, and grounded in my belief that making with our hands is essential to who we are and who we can become. Proof, held in the object itself, that everything we touch, we change, and everything we change, changes us.
Points of pride: participated in CraftTexas 2025 with my ceramic/fiber piece “The Shores.” I won one of the Juror’s Awards for my piece “Triple Spirit” in the Big Show at Lawndale in 2024. My work is recently featured in a French publication about fiber artists: in Le Fil dans l’art contemporian: 125 artistes au coeur de la création. Edited by Charolette Vannier. Paris: Pyramyd Éditions.
I also love this quote from Joseph Stanley in Glasstire about my work in the CraftTexas 2025 show: “Anni Albers called weaving a collaboration with matter, a practice where material acts back. That lens unlocks these rooms…DeConick’s porcelain-fiber shore holds multiple tempos: glaze that slid and froze, dyed fiber that keeps slower color, edges feathering like tide on rock. Not landscape pictures, but landscape behavior…Texture moves from image into structure without ceremony…A biological layer stands under the scene…an inland tidepool of porcelain and fiber that avoids spectacle and rewards patience…Sweep back to the brown wall and let your sightline pass through lunar, desert, and shore in one breath. The thesis clicks without rhetoric: refinery and reef trade habits; the handshake leaves a seam; the seam learns to hold.”
FROM: https://glasstire.com/2025/11/04/the-surfaces-that-show-receipts-crafttexas-2025/
Who else deserves credit in your story?
My biggest cheerleaders are my husband, Wade Greiner, who assists me with the heavy stuff and shows, and my son, Alexander DeGreiner who photographs me and my work. Julie Verville, the owner of The Ardest Gallery, has been a tremendous supporter of my work, assisting me with commissions and exhibition opportunities. A fellow ceramicist, Doni Langlois, has also been there, encouraging me to keep exploring and pushing the boundaries of clay. Very grateful to her. Jodi Walsh’s ceramic wall art inspired me from the first time I saw it. Since then, she has become a friend and mentor, always ready to share her wealth of knowledge and experience with me. The sculptor Trayce Wear is my fellow glaze collaborator and confidant (I took a glaze class from her). Thankful for her friendship and power lunches. Also a shout out to Kevin Bass and everyone at the Ceramic Store of Houston. Couldn’t do it without them!
Pricing:
- Fiber pieces range from $1500-5000
- Sculptural ceramics range from $300-800
- Occasional small items range from $20-100
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.aprildeconick.art
- Instagram: @aprildeconickart
- Facebook: @aprildeconickart
