Nuala Creed Artist Profile

I was born in Dublin, Ireland and grew up in a small town in rural Ireland. As a young child it was a good place to be but as a teen the best thing about that town was the train to Dublin. I am one of seven children. I was one of the younger kids with two younger brothers. My Mum was a housewife and my Dad was a civil engineer. I attended a Catholic girls boarding school in Dublin for five years as a teenager. This was a formative experience as it forced me to be more independent and less shy. Though shyness has always been a struggle. I am dyslexic so that was a challenge with my education especially at a time before computers and spellcheck. Back then in Ireland there was no acknowledgment of dyslexia which made school difficult. I spent a lot of time daydreaming and indeed I still do. But in some ways now I see that my dyslexia may have helped in dealing with life’s struggles.

I came to the US in the summer of 1989 when I was 24 on a student visa and loved the freedom and openness that I felt back then in Cambridge MA. I studied early childhood education and got a teaching job in a wonderful preschool in Cambridge. I lived in Cambridge for 17 years. I met Jeffrey my husband there and we came west to California together as the tech world was booming and Jeffrey was offered a job. We lived in San Francisco for five years before moving to Petaluma. I attended art school CCA (California College of the Arts) in Oakland and got my BFA in ceramics. I loved being there and I was eager to explore clay and other art materials such as fiber arts, sculpture, and painting. But clay was my home it is the material I feel most comfortable with.

I love the immediacy of clay, I like that I can work my ideas out quickly, or that I can spend hours on detailed work if I chose to. I also love the tactile quality of using clay. I am intrigued by the connection to the artist that one feels when holding a handmade clay object.

As artists we reflect on what we observe in our world. Visual language has the power to emote on a visceral level. This is what I strive for in my work – in a poetic way.

Much of my work addresses difficult questions that we confront in our time. I often use the figure of the child as a provocative element to illustrate important topics.

My main body of work is an ongoing commission for the Internet Archive in San Francisco. I have been working on this since 2010. I make statues of the employee at the archive. To date there are 168 sculptures, they range in hight between 3.5 and 4 feet tall. They are on display at the archive in the great room as their permanent collection. The archive is housed in a former church, hence the pews in the photos.

During Covid I made a visual diary of a year in 52 mugs. My mugs are intimate hand made objects made to invite reflection on the harrowing Covid years we all lived through. I see these mugs as small relics; artifacts of that time. As I made them I was not concerned about their weight as a potter would be. Indeed I often used ill-fitting glazes that pitted as they worked with the image I was portraying. I would get excited when the glaze shifted slightly in the kiln. Now I am busy making a book about this project that I hope to exhibit with the mugs sometime.

I recently went to Chile on a residency that has inspired new work that I am excited about which relates to the city of Valparaiso and the amazing houses I saw there.

I feel like different aspects of my personality come through in my work. I have my serious side that shows up in my more confrontational political work. While my lighter side come through in my quirkier small sculptures. There is often a cathartic feeling after having made some of my work. An example is my QAnon mug series where I write letters to Q as his mother offering advice to him.

I try to get in my studio five days a week. I work there for at least four hours a day, more is always better for me as I need my alone time.

My interests are spending time with friends, especially women friends, travel, seeing art museums, galleries, food, walking, reading, gardening, music and connecting with family though all of mine are in Europe. I enjoy winding down in the evening with my husband and dog going for a stroll and watching Netflix etc series especially foreign movies and series.