Where's the Toast?, 2025

Bradford Davis

Ceramic Stoneware, Underglaze, Acrylic Shelf, Magnet

Various Sizes

Pressed Artist Stamp

Bradford Davis brings a playful contemporary sensibility to the vessel form with Where's the Toast?, a striking set of three ceramic vases. Bold silhouettes and smooth surfaces are paired with a rich, avocado-inspired palette, balancing references to ceramic history with a distinctly modern aesthetic.

The title provides the punchline: you've got the avocado-now, where's the toast? Davis' humor adds an unexpected lightness to these sophisticated forms, reminding us that contemporary art can be both beautifully considered and fun.

Displayed together, the three vessels create a dynamic conversation of form, color, and scale. Where's the Toast? is a sophisticated, and clever, addition to a contemporary art collection.

Artist Statement

The transport amphora was a durable yet ultimately disposable tool. Designed for commerce, amphorae circulated across cultures carrying goods before being discarded or repurposed. I use this vessel as a surrogate for the human body-particularly the veteran body-to question where value resides when a tool can no longer perform its intended function. Like the amphora, veteran bodies have often been valued for their ability to labor, serve, protect, and endure rather than for the complexity of the lives they contain.

What can something discarded become? Rather than erasing evidence of change, each sculpture preserves the marks of what it has experienced. Through altering the form and disrupting its surface, I explore how an object carries its history. Like scars on a body, every crack, seam, and layer becomes part of the patina of lived experience.

Color offers another language for transformation. My increasing use of vibrant color reflects an evolution in both my work and sense of self, shaped in part by post-traumatic growth. Variations in form, color, surface, and scale accumulate into multiple portraits of identity, each iteration representing a different state of the self. Identity emerges through these variations not as a fixed construct, but as something layered, cumulative, and continually changing.

These works reject the expectation that restoration means returning to what existed before. Instead, they consider how fracture and transformation can carry what has already existed forward into something previously unimaginable.

Artist Biography

Bradford Davis is an award-winning multimedia artist who uses ceramics as the base matrix to express his feelings, emotions, and responses to his traumas and life experiences. As a retired Army Artillery Officer, he mines his journey of healing to feed his creative research. He mixes fibers, metal, and stained glass with wheel thrown ceramics; to explore the personification of the amphora vessel in its destruction, restoration, and rebirth. Davis received his MFA at Temple University's Tyler School of Art & Architecture and his BFA from the University of South Carolina, both with a focus in ceramics. He has been an Artist in Residence at Tainan National University of the Arts, Taiwan. His works have been shown internationally and can be found in the collection of the McKissick Museum. Bradford maintains a private studio in Downingtown, PA.

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