2025 Florida CraftArt Emerging Artist Program

2025 Florida CraftArt Emerging Artist Program

Program Dates: July 1, 2025–February 28, 2026
Exhibition Dates: January 10–24, 2026

 

Florida CraftArt is excited to launch the 2025 Emerging Artist Program, designed to nurture and advance the careers of emerging craft artists. Artists working in Fine Crafts media have an exceptional opportunity to grow their careers and showcase their work to the community. Accepted artists receive a benefits package valued at over $1,000, including an honorarium, business mentoring, a professional photo session, printed postcards, and more, along with representation in the FCA retail gallery and group exhibition in the FCA exhibition space.

2025 Florida CraftArt Emerging Artists:
  Molly Duff-Clarke (St. Petersburg, FL), ceramics
  Mary-Helen Horne (Lutz, FL), printmaking
  Daria Kidd (St. Petersburg, FL), jewelry/metals
  Rachel Kinbar (Winter Park, FL), ceramics
  Lisa Ramudo (Tampa, FL), fibers
  Fan Su (Bradenton, FL), glass
  Sofia Vidal (Boca Raton, FL), ceramics/jewelry
  Amanda Westenberg (St. Petersburg, FL), ceramics

Learn more about the program here: https://floridacraftart.org/artist-opportunities/emerging-artist-program/
Be among the first to find out when 2026 Emerging Artist Program applications open: https://mailchi.mp/b17acbc5b7c0/subscribe-fca-artist-opportunities

 

2025 Emerging Artist Program Presenting Sponsors: David & Becky Ramsey

 

Meet the 2025 Florida CraftArt Emerging Artists!

 

Molly Duff-Clarke (St. Petersburg, FL)

Artist Statement: My studio practice investigates joy through form, color, and texture. In using bright colors, fuzzy yarns, and decorative surfaces I create an atmosphere of delight. Occasionally, I include fragments of the human figure and invite humor into the conversation. I explore the relationship between contradicting materials. By arranging hard, fired clay with soft, velvety fabrics I investigate how the two interact. This use of materials, paired with molds of a truncated male form, creates a relationship to the burlesque. I enjoy the exploration of pleasure in common household objects. Turning a table lamp into a sculpture filled with whimsy, lights up the viewer’s space with joy. My hope is to invite playfulness into daily actions. My practice explores a gluttonous consumption of pleasure without shame. I aim to share a moment with my viewer that evokes a smile. I employ coiling and pinching which allows me to leave evidence of my hand in the object’s surface.

Mary-Helen Horne (Lutz, FL)

Artist Statement: As a printmaker, I work improvisationally, combining relief, intaglio, and monotype in layers of positive, negative, and distorted imagery that suggest the effects of time on visual memory. Driven by a profound concern for the fragile diversity of our natural world, I look to trees as symbols of our connection to the Earth, embodying nature’s resilience, sacrifice, and boundless generosity. My monoprints present impressions of future memories of trees not yet lost to deforestation, commodification and climate change.

Daria Kidd (St. Petersburg, FL)

Artist Statement: My current collection, Cruel Jewels, is a constantly evolving body of handcrafted jewelry designed to empower the wearer to embrace their truest self. Every piece is meticulously handmade using both ancient and contemporary techniques. These techniques include lost wax casting, forging, sawing, filling, and weaving metal into the desired form. I am interested in creating balance within opposition. For example, pairing something typically considered gross (a bunch of silver bugs) with something beautiful (a shiny silver necklace).

 

Rachel Kinbar (Winter Park, FL)

Artist Statement: My work is an attempt to make sense of the world and my (in particular) and our (in general) place in it. I am interested in texture and in projects that are slow, painstaking, repetitive. I have a deep interest in process. For me, the making of art is the work and the resulting pieces are artifacts. Lineage and value are throughlines in my work. Where did we come from and where are we going? How can we be good ancestors? What do we value, individually and collectively? How do we assign “value” to materials, things, each other, and our planet?

My matriarch series explores women and femmes from Jewish history. These works can be appreciated as beautiful at first glance, but the true interest and story are revealed with a closer look. The sculptures are hand built with white stoneware clay, and each indentation is made individually with a metal leather stamp. The pieces are glazed in layers. by looking at details and seeing how each contributes to the whole, we can understand that our actions contribute to the collective and that we often need to put aside individual preferences for the greater good.

The ballet series explores texture and movement. A piece of clay is rolled out as thinly as possible between two thick sheets of plastic. The humidity that is trapped under the plastic creates a skin-like texture when the plastic is pulled away. I then crumple the clay to produce an elegant form that looks like it is made from fabric. Only the top or bottom of these pieces is glazed, including in the folds. Much like ballet challenges a dancer’s limits, so too am I exploring the capacity of clay to take on new, unexpected forms.

 

Lisa Ramudo (Tampa, FL)

Artist Statement: My work is rooted in history and tradition. I trained in fine arts as a teen and adult, but learned weaving, sewing, knitting and other traditional crafts as a child. The two are combined in my current work which brings together painting and sculpture with basketry and jewelry making. I paint watercolor paper with acrylic paint, then cut the paper into strips which I weave into baskets and sculptural forms. These objects are then finished with thread, wire, and natural elements.

 

 

Fan Su (Bradenton, FL)

Artist Statement: My work navigates the intersections of cultural identity, censorship, and the female experience. Born in China and later immersed in the U.S., I confront the contrasts between these cultures—particularly in how identity and the female body are perceived. These tensions fuel my introspective exploration of the body as a vessel of memory, sensuality, pain, and resilience. Glass, with its transparency and fragility, serves as both medium and metaphor—representing vision, censorship, and the manipulation of perception. I often combine glass with materials like stockings, chiffon, rope, video, and sound to create immersive installations that examine suppressed histories and the complex realities of the Asian female body. Through this practice, I aim to foster empathy, bridge cultural divides, and create space for reflection and dialogue around identity and embodiment.

 

Sofia Vidal (Boca Raton, FL)

Artist Statement: I am a ceramic artist based in South Florida, and much of my work grows from a fascination with the visual languages of pre-Hispanic cultures. For years I have been drawn to their patterns and symbols, which I see as fragments of dreams—powerful but incomplete, like pieces of a story we are still trying to remember. My practice is a way of reimagining those fragments and giving them a place in the present.

In the studio, I move between hand-building, nerikomi, and slip casting. Handbuilding gives me freedom and intimacy with the clay, while nerikomi allows me to build layered surfaces that feel like woven textiles. I often think of them as echoes of ancient Andean cloth, where earth and memory are bound together like threads. Slip casting, on the other hand, gives me consistency when I need it, offering a steady form against which I can experiment with surface and pattern. I like that these different techniques balance each other—structure and fluidity, repetition and improvisation.

For me, ceramics is not only about objects but about conversations across time. The motifs I reference were never just decoration; they carried deep spiritual and social meanings. By working with them now, I’m not trying to replicate the past but to enter into dialogue with it, to imagine what these patterns might still have to tell us. My work is a way of honoring cultural continuity, while also inviting space for reinvention and personal interpretation.

 

Amanda Westenberg (St. Petersburg, FL)

Artist Statement: The story of an object often extends beyond the hands that shape it. Its meaning can shift with time. An item might be preserved, discarded, or buried, then later inherited, unearthed, and reinterpreted into someone else’s history. We project narratives onto artifacts. That is what I invite viewers to do with my work: to pause, unsure whether they’re encountering something contemporary or ancient, and begin to imagine its story.

While many of my pieces are vessels, I think of myself more as a ceramic artist than a potter. I approach these forms sculpturally, guided more by references to historical objects than by functional use. My influences are eclectic, drawn from ancient and modern sources across cultures. The work does not reference a specific time, place, or people, but rather reflects a shared human experience. Each piece hints at the passage of time and the desire to leave something behind that endures.

I began working with clay during a period shaped by both joy and grief, welcoming new life while mourning loss. I was drawn to the ways objects hold memory, whether factual or romanticized. My process is tactile, meditative, and cathartic, following a slow rhythm of building and refining. I hand-build with intention, often starting with slabs in a process that feels architectural. I balance form and surface, disrupting geometric lines with organic textures. Some works remain smooth with subtle wear. Others are heavily textured and layered. I want each piece to feel aged, like something uncovered, carrying a sense of time and presence

 

 

Questions? Contact gallery@floridacraftart.org or call 727-821-7391.

Contact Liz Cooper for sponsorship opportunities at liz@floridacraftart.org or 727-821-7391.