For the past two years, ceramic artist Molly Altman has been living in Carbondale — teaching, creating, foraging, and like many who move here, falling in love with the valley. 

In 2023, Altman had packed up her belongings and relocated from California to Carbondale to begin an artist residency at the Carbondale Clay Center. 

“I remember telling somebody right before I moved that it was the most excited I had ever been about anything in my life, which felt like a huge thing to say after I heard myself say that out loud,” Altman said. “I was right to have said that and…it even exceeded those expectations.”

After two years at the center, her residency will come to a close on Aug. 30. Altman’s final hurrah is a cumulation of her work during the residency — the Clay Center’s newest exhibition, “(In)fluorescence.” 

Running from July 7 to Aug. 30, the exhibit showcases a collection of 16 lamps Altman crafted. Some are simple creations adorned with colored glaze, while others are made of locally foraged plants cast in porcelain.

“I really wanted to take the opportunity to do something really fun and really different from what my normal work looks like at this point,” Altman said. “The point of a residency is to develop and explore and grow and try things in a supportive environment, and I’ve never done any of the things that are involved in this show (In)fluorescence.”

Altman formed the bodies of the botanical lamps with wheel-thrown porcelain and added cork bases. She then dipped foraged plants into a porcelain slip — made from a recipe she developed during her residency — building up slip layers to capture the plants’ intricate details while creating a durable final product. 

She fired the dipped plants, allowing the organic material to burn away and leaving behind porcelain castings. These were then arranged onto the lamp bases, creating what she describes as a “lush floral effect,” before the lamps were wired. 

The ceramic stems and leaves of mullein, milkweed, amaranth, burdock and thistle — all collected within a mile of Altman’s studio — now cradle softly glowing globes in a garden of functional art. 

“One of the things that I love about the material that I work with — about porcelain and about the slip recipe that I use — is the way the porcelain interacts with light in general,” Altman said. “It’s able to capture the properties of the plant, but it renders it transparent, so when you hold it up to light, you can actually see through the piece .

“In general, on a sculpture, when the lighting just happens to be right, sometimes you can see it, but I really wanted to highlight it and pay attention to it,” she added. “By bringing light, literally, to a piece, and giving it that luminosity and that translucence, I thought it was a really great opportunity to really utilize some of the most exciting properties of the porcelain.”

The exhibit’s title, “(In)fluorescence,” is wordplay that intertwines plants and light. “Inflorescence” refers to an intricate flower cluster that appears, at first glance, as a single bloom. “(In)fluorescence” blends that botanical term with fluorescence, which refers to light. 

“It’s combining them to say that I’m taking lots and lots of individual plant specimens and putting them all together to create something that looks like one whole, and then I’m illuminating that,” Altman said. “So it’s an (In)fluorescence in the natural sense and in the light sense.”

Altman hopes that her work invites viewers to slow down, and see nature in a different — quite literal — light.

“Taking local plants and using them in this way abstracts them and reconfigures them and represents them to an audience in a way that I think brings attention for people in a way that they might not have had previously,” Altman said. “I hope that this show is a way for people to celebrate and connect with their environment in a setting that feels fun and interesting and light.”