Liza Riddle creates minimalist ceramic sculptures that echo the quiet drama of the natural world. Her work captures a moment suspended in time — expressing nature’s quiet power and celebrating the earth’s elemental palette. Working primarily in unglazed black or white porcelain, she explores the tension between fragility and resilience — cracked surfaces that appear on the verge of collapse, yet remain whole and enduring. Her sculptures invite reflection on time, transformation, and the elemental forces that shape our environment.

Her ongoing series, Traces of Time, draws inspiration from patterns and processes found in nature — cracked desert lake beds, crystalline structures, wave movements, and the slow orbit of celestial bodies. These forms speak to geological time and the quiet rhythms of change that often go unnoticed.

Each piece is intentionally constructed to crack and fissure, using physical processes to create surfaces that feel both ephemeral and permanent. Though delicate in appearance, the works are fully vitrified — solid, enduring, and strong. Some sculptures retain the raw beauty of natural clay, while others are infused with her own soluble metal formulations, resulting in organic and often unpredictable surface effects — subtle shifts in tone, iridescence, and natural patterning.

Riddle approaches her practice as a collaboration with nature. Her background in both science and art informs this perspective, allowing her to harness natural phenomena not just as inspiration, but as active agents in the making. The result is work that holds a sense of suspended energy — forms caught mid-metamorphosis, or slowly returning to earth.

Her work has been featured in major international exhibitions, including the 4th Blanc de Chine (China), the 62nd Faenza Prize (Italy), and the 11th International Ceramics Competition in Mino (Japan). She has exhibited widely in the United States, including the NCECA Juried Exhibition and, most recently, at the 80th Scripps College Ceramics Annual.

She studied science, art, and environmental planning in California, and her work is represented by Galerie du Don (France), Jeffrey Spahn Gallery (Berkeley), Plinth Gallery (Denver), Abel Contemporary (Wisconsin), and the Ren Brown Collection (Bodega Bay, CA).