HOUSTON, TX.- Houston Center for Contemporary Craft is presenting Sanctuary for Salvage, a site-specific installation by ceramic artist Jeff Forster. Working with reclaimed clay, glaze waste, and kiln debris, Forster constructs monumental columns that evoke historical ruins, rituals, and a sense of the sacred. Echoing totems, the columns of sacral architecture, and Japanese torii gates found in various spiritual spaces, Forster meditates on the symbolic and spiritual weight these pillars carry. By transforming materials like Styrofoam packaging into molds for his clay sculptures and reusing glaze waste, the artist’s process engages with themes of geological time and harnesses the unpredictable energy released during the firing process.

A longtime friend and collaborator with Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, Forster is an alumnus of HCCC’s Artist Residency Program and is the founding organizer of Ceramics in the Environment, an annual garden exhibition initiated in 2015, in partnership with the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston’s Glassell School of Art. Many of the richly layered surfaces in his work originate from glaze waste collected in his ceramics classroom, where students' byproducts are integrated into his own compositions. By transforming discarded and industrial materials into vitrified, enduring forms, Forster elevates the overlooked, recasting contemporary detritus into objects of permanence, value, and cultural memory.

Sanctuary for Salvage is curated by HCCC Curatorial Fellow, Zaynab Hilal.

Jeff Forster is the head of the ceramics department at the Glassell School of Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. His work has won awards in several exhibitions, including a Juror’s Choice Award in the exhibition Ceramic Object/Conceptual Material and the Luis Jimenez Award for first place in Sculpture on Campus at Southern Illinois University. In conjunction with his residency at the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, Forster was awarded the Helen Drutt Studio Fellowship. He has also completed residencies at Atelierhaus Hilmsen in Germany, Lone Star College-North Harris in Texas, the Armory Arts Center in Florida, and most recently at Guldagergaard International Ceramic Research Center in Denmark.

In addition to overseeing the Glassell ceramics studio and maintaining an active studio practice, Forster has been a member of several boards and committees, including the Artist Residency Committee at Houston Center for Contemporary Craft; the Fresh Arts Artist Advisory Committee; the ClayHouston board (serving as president); and the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts board, where he served as the on-site liaison for the organization’s 2013 Houston conference. Forster received a BA in art from Saint John's University in 1998 and an MFA from Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville, in 2007.