Dallas Wooten was born in Louisville, KY. He earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts in Ceramics from Indiana University Southeast, right across the river. Upon graduating, he attended Ohio University’s graduate program. Wooten completed his Masters in Fine Arts from OU in 2020. Following his time at OU, Wooten was a long-term Artist-in-Residence at Hope Center for Arts and Technology, Inc., where he taught classes at HopeCAT as well as Youngstown State University. Wooten was awarded as a 2022 Ceramics Monthly Emerging Artist and was featured in the ArtStream Nomadic Gallery expo at the 2023 and 2025 NCECA conference. Wooten has shown work in the Southern Crossing Pottery Festival, Finger Lakes Pottery Tour, Flower City Pottery Invitational, Hilltown 6 Pottery Tour, Asparagus Valley Pottery Trail and the American Pottery Festival. Wooten founded Wooten Clayworks in 2020, which opened its physical location one year ago in Hackettstown, New Jersey. Wooten currently teaches and curates high quality ceramic exhibitions and workshops at Wooten Clayworks, where he's working to build a community to share his joy for pottery with. Recently, Wooten founded the Princeton Pottery Festival with Ben Carter and Eric Rempe, seeking to offer high-quality ceramic work and expand the ceramic field in the New Jersey Region.
Wooten utilizes the flaws, blemishes, and marks created in the process of making, and recontextualizes them within intricate patterning inspired by traditional status-imagery, patterns, and materials. Wooten’s work explores historically utilitarian and simple forms. These pots are then adorned with process and gestural marks abstracted into status-based patterns, such as vine scroll and floral imagery. The work aims to take process and residual information left by the hand to emphasize the importance of the human mark within the context of status-informed pottery. There are aesthetic and conceptual ties to both Japanese ceramics and modernist design that are considered within the work, both visually and metaphorically. Form and silhouette are of the utmost importance, as they serve as the canvas and frame in which these explorations take place. The pots, although functional and minimal, then serve as both objects of desire and functional vessels for consumption or display.
Website:
https://www.dallaswootenceramics.com/
Instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/dallas_wooten_ceramics/?hl=en
Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/DallasWootenCeramics/
Classes, workshops, and gallery: