Bio

Roxanne Wolanczyk (b. 1971, New York; lives and works in New York) creates narrative ceramic vessels inscribed with first-person text, self-portraiture, and symbolic imagery. Working with classical vessel forms, she uses ceramics to explore the body as both a physical and metaphorical vessel—one that holds memory, emotion, resilience, and the visible traces of time. Through the juxtaposition of contemporary language with archetypal forms, Wolanczyk brings intimate personal experience into conversation with the long histories of ceramics, mythology, and human meaning-making.

Originally trained as a sculptor, Wolanczyk was drawn to ceramics for the medium's ability to embody both permanence and fragility. She began incorporating drawings of her own body alongside imagery drawn from art history, alchemy, mythology, and the natural world. The text inscribed on her vessels carries dual meanings, establishing a metaphor between the self, the vessel, and the cultural contexts they inhabit. These layered references place deeply personal narratives within broader symbolic traditions while examining how women have historically been represented—and how they might reclaim the authority to represent themselves.

As her practice has developed, and through the experiences of motherhood and aging, Wolanczyk has increasingly focused on the body as an archive of lived experience. Her vessels consider aging, mortality, spiritual transformation, and emotional endurance.

Wolanczyk received a BFA in Sculpture from Pratt Institute. Her work has been exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum, the Bronx Museum, the New York State Museum, Pierogi, PS122, Art in General, the Wassaic Project, and in Expired (2026), an exhibition she curated and participated in at Essex Flowers, presented by apexart. Her work has been reviewed in The New York Times and by Robert C. Morgan for Tema Celeste, and she has received funding from the New York State Council on the Arts.