North Ford Ceramics

Tessa Gehringer Monk is an interdisciplinary artist hailing from the American South, now living and working on the Isle of Benbecula. She earned her Masters of Fine Arts in Art,  Society & Publics from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design in 2018. She was a Saltire Scholarship recipient in 2018, and has exhibited in the US, the UK, and the Netherlands.

Gehringer Monk has been a lifelong artist, starting her professional career early on with photographic self portraiture as a method of catharsis for psychological anguish. Over the years she has transformed this cathartic theme using ceramics and various media. Her goals are to connect with others across time and space and to find common threads within humanity from which to draw from.

She believes it is necessary for us to craft a world for ourselves where we are connected to one another, to the place in which we live, to the other beings we share this place with, and to our common spiritual nature. This deeply rooted belief is evident in both her artwork and her day-to-day small life on a small Hebridean island.

She uses the natural clays, landscapes and local materials of the Hebrides in her work and uses the symbol of the self as a stand-in for humanity itself.