Avery Connett
Avery Connett is a sculptor-writer working primarily with clay and found language. She is currently finishing her degree in English and Creative Writing at the University of Texas at Austin, however, she considers Austin Community College—where she began her ceramics practice in 2021—her true alma mater. Connett has exhibited in group shows at the UMLAUF, Cloud Tree Gallery, ACC, and for Austin Studio Tours. Her sculptures are currently on view at City Hall in the People’s Gallery and at ACC’s Highland campus on permanent display. Connett is a two-time Austin Art League Scholarship and ACC Chancellor’s Choice Award recipient. In 2025, her work won “Best In Ceramics” at the Annual ACC Student Show.
Avery’s introduction to clay began as a child, making pinch pots from mud puddles in the dirt road of her family’s farm. Today, her ceramics practice is informed by her relationship to the land and soil which shaped her. There is a close similarity between the repetitive motions of field-work and sculpting. Working in her mother’s flower fields, Avery became practiced in moving soil and trimming leaves to cultivate the floral body. Her mother’s habit of speaking to her flowers like people was a major influence in Avery’s sculptures, which are characterized by blending the curves in human forms with the organic movement of plants.
Flos Nodi, 2026
Ceramic
42 x 14 inch
Flos Nodi is a meditation on natural growth processes, paying special attention to flowering—
a plant’s most vulnerable and intense state. Like pollinators, we are drawn primarily to this stage of a plant’s life for its suspended, apical beauty. We like to preserve flowers: maintain them in water, press them in books, distill them into perfumes, dry them, paint them, or capture them in ceramic. Once a flower has bloomed, it faces death head on. The flower stuck in clay represents its own posthumous image, defined forever by its warm peak before petal-fall.
As a “dead” language, Latin’s fixed meanings lend itself to creating new (species) classifications, and thus conveys our attempts to bring the unknown into focus. As a child learning herbalism on the farm, I was overwhelmed by the heaviness of these latin names. Now I appreciate that they tell a story of parts. Flos Nodi combines the woody permanence of trees in its base with the soft ephemerality of its crown. Its name is derived, however, from its abdominal drama—the stem pierces through itself at the top of its base before winding organically upwards to bloom. Flos Nodi means “flower of the knot,” paying homage to the dramatic growth pattern of plants which know how to adapt through self-effacement. Bamboo, ferns, and yuccas all grow as new stalks rupture through dense, internal tissue, layering time.
While linear growth models reflect the angularity of the modern age, plant growth continues to deflect this through curvaceous adaptation—live oaks bulging around barbed wire and tin roofs, for example. Flos Nodi’s self-perforation that makes its continual growth possible inscribes a kind of beauty which is often taken for granted—the beauty of learning.
