We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Landis Carey. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Landis below.

Hi Landis, thanks for joining us today. We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.

I’m a ceramic artist and a synesthete: I feel color. It hasn’t always been this way. In 2018, I was diagnosed with a rare cancer, and through my surgeries and recovery, my meditations deepened so much that I began seeing and feeling color.

My meditative visions consist of undulating colors, each bringing its own uplifting, expansive, healing energy. Through my artwork, I aim to translate these color meditations onto clay surfaces for others to experience as well. I’m constantly experimenting with color to expand my palette and build a library to draw from.

This distinct part of my practice is the most personal and meaningful work I do—it’s my calling, and it’s on a continuum. One meditation melds into another, and I move between them. Once I experience them, I can revisit and relive the colors and feelings.

Expansive Peace and Absolute Acceptance are two recent ceramic installations I completed. Expansive Peace comprises seventeen ceramic surfaces that I glazed to replicate a small portion of the color vision I had in the spring of 2025. Colors fluctuated between lavender, eggplant, periwinkle, and a brilliant, pure white light, and communicated pure peace. The vision occurred shortly after my family experienced a house fire. The color experience was short-lived but is seared in my visual and emotional memory.

The meditative color experience that inspired Absolute Acceptance is different. It’s endured—I’ve tapped into it for over two years, since the summer of 2023. Yellows gently fluctuate from deep ochre to sunshine to straw as pure white light pierces the color veils. There are different color densities, ranging from opaque to fluid and transparent. The deep, earthy ochre holds the pain of loss. It’s muddy, sticky, and hurts when I near it, so I travel towards the light and the brightest yellow, instead, where the colors are hopeful, expansive, and enduring, full of possibility.

In considering acceptance, at its inflection, there is both contraction and expansion, loss and hope. It’s about letting go of what could be, accepting what is, and then going back to what could be—just in a different way, with other circumstances.

In the installation Absolute Acceptance, I explore the counterbalance between contraction and expansion, loss and hope. The rich, bright yellow is intended to reach out and envelop the viewer from a distance, across the gallery, with its expanding energy of hope—the hope that rises after the loss of acceptance. The warm neutral glazing grounds the expansion at its inception. The work is hand-built from white stoneware and color-blocked with many layers of underglaze and glaze, creating the density of color that allows it to move forward.

These works are personal yet transcend my own perspective. My meditations continue to teach me as I revisit them, and as long as I remain open, they help me navigate what lies ahead.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I’ve been working with clay for over twenty years. Yet, I only professionalized my art practice and became a full-time working artist two years ago after relocating back to Florida and receiving a four-year residency at Arts Warehouse, an arts center in Delray Beach, Florida. I hand-build clay installations, produce functional pottery, and teach classes in wheel and handbuilding techniques.

In 2018, I was diagnosed with a rare pancreatic cancer. After a strenuous recovery, my ceramic practice shifted to include experimental installation when I began experiencing color visions during meditation. The emotionally charged, infinite swaths of rich, undulating color and piercing white light I experience underpin my work today.

Experimenting with glaze quality, I recreate portions of my color visions on clay wall installations. I intricately layer glazes to achieve color and light variations. I’m particularly interested in where lighter glazes pierce darker ones and reach the vessel’s surface, where ambient light further draws the viewer’s attention.

I handbuild my installations from slabs of various mid-range stoneware clay bodies and have developed a library of over 400 glaze tests that I draw from when planning my work. I also throw functional ware on a pottery wheel and further test glaze combinations on the surfaces of those vessels.

Teaching rounds out my practice. I’m in residency at Arts Warehouse in Delray Beach, Florida, and there I teach ongoing wheel-throwing classes and handbuilding workshops. Teaching keeps me connected to the foundational skills that underpin my practice.

What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?

My goal is for viewers to experience my installation work and feel the energy that I experienced in my color meditation. I use glaze color and quality to guide viewers to the feelings evoked by each meditation, each unique in the emotions it conveys, some calming, enveloping, and reassuring, while others are expansive and hopeful.

Lying in a hospital bed in 2018, I dreamt of making this artwork and paddleboarding. I had never paddleboarded, but today I’m creating this art, and I love to paddleboard. This work is my calling. I’m meant to share these experiences. I want my work displayed in healthcare settings where people are at their most vulnerable, facing long and arduous roads to recovery, and need uplifting, healing energy the most.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

Receiving a metastatic rare pancreatic cancer diagnosis at 37 with three very young children at home was devastating. My daughter was still nursing. Less than 30 days later, I left for the hospital for an extensive surgery and an 8-day stay. My husband and I took an Uber into New York City, and as I walked into the hospital, I unknowingly entered a portal where my life would forever be altered, where all of my perceptions would sharpen. It was the beginning of a new journey, one that would recalibrate our lives.

I’m not cancer-free today, but my illness is stable thanks to a combination of holistic lifestyle changes and modern medicine. Living with illness requires mental clarity, strength, and awareness that I had to learn. Through meditation and boundary setting, I’ve been able to understand how to navigate the intricacies of living with illness while remaining solidly present.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.landiscarey.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/landiscarey_ceramics/

Image Credits

Beatrice Bizarro Gil