For J. Zona, the artistic process begins long before she starts to mold the clay. An important part of her process is gathering materials from the environment rather than buying them. She digs her own clay at sites in Abiquiu and Socorro.

She also built a coffin-style wood kiln in her yard. The kiln gives her more independence, so she can be sure of having a place to fire her work after she graduates.

Zona is in her final year of graduate school at UNM, completing work on her M.F.A. thesis.

A goal in her graduate studies has been to work large scale and push the boundaries of what is known as ceramics. Much of her recent work focuses on large scale stacking clay forms, with close attention paid to texture.

She does a lot of hiking and picks up sticks, stones, rocks, bones and other found objects, which she uses to create three dimensional textures in the surface of clay sculptures. She then incorporates the objects in five foot square charcoal and paint drawings on plywood canvasses.

The Wilderness Stacks directly incorporate found objects, like sticks and bolts. Part of the idea is that when viewers walk through the installation, the scale of the works and the integration of objects will give them a sense of being part of nature.

In another recent found object series, Zona got fascinated with swamp cooler pads. She combines the pads with ceramic cookie cutter shapes. The red clay looks like meat, but she’s a vegetarian so she calls these sculptures the Meet series.

She’s also working on some very small sculptures. She said if you have something really big, you don’t really know how big it is until you see it next to something really small.

Zona is originally from Michigan. At the age of 25, she went back to school and had a ceramics teacher who proved to her that she could sculpt for the rest of her life. Through that teacher’s influence, she took a workshop with Peter Voulkos, who she said is the Jackson Pollack of ceramics, though she didn’t know it at the time. During a poster-signing after the workshop and a dinner, she couldn’t afford the poster, so she had him sign her arm.

Another of her influences is Jun Kaneko, who Zona said holds the world record for creating the largest ceramic form.

Zona worked at Ghost Ranch in Abiquiu in 2001, 2002 and 2003, and she fell in love with the land. That love drew her to pursue graduate studies at UNM. After she came, she found that UNM had the space for her to grow into large scale works. She’ll be showing some of those works during a thesis exhibit in the spring.