Patti Warashina, Nighthawk' 25-B, Earthenware, Underglaze, glaze, 10.5" x 13.5" x 4"

The human figure has fascinated ceramic sculptor Patti Warashina for most of her 55+ year art career. Her sustaining interest in the human figure is likely due to the fact that her own body is the closest resource from which she draws her ideas. Warashina draws from her daily life and has an abnormal interest in the absurdity and foibles of human behavior, in which her figures have become the actors in her introspective narratives.

Warashina's early study and exploration of freely associated "realistic" figures evolved and mutated over time to simpler, reductive, exaggerated forms, with details left only for facial features and extremities to tie the body back into a sense of reality.

Patti Warashina is nationally recognized for her work. In 1994, she was elected to the American Craft Council's College of Fellows. She received the Twining Humber Lifetime Achievement/Woman of the Year Award in 2001 from Seattle's Artist Trust and earned the University of Washington Division of the Arts Distinguished Alumna Award in 2003. In 2012 she received the National Endowment for the Arts Award and in 2020, she was the recipient of the Smithsonian's Visionary Artist Award for more than 50 years of groundbreaking work in ceramics

Her works are in the collections of the Museum of Arts and Design, the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, Japan, the Seattle Art Museum and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.