Rebeca Proctor

Rebeca Proctor is an artist and craftswoman based in Elgin, Texas. Her and her husband own East Side Pot Shop, a community ceramics studio in East Austin, Texas. Rebeca was born in Houston where she was introduced to clay at a young age. She moved to Austin in 2013 to receive her Bachelors of Fine Arts in Studio Art from the University of Texas at Austin. During her time at UT College of Fine Arts, Rebeca focused on metal casting, bronze, and mixed media sculpture. Now, she is raising two young sons in the countryside outside of Austin, balancing motherhood with her studio practice. Clay remains her main medium, but Rebeca also experiments with craft processes in textiles and natural materials, and is always seeking practical ways to integrate art making into the day to day life of raising children.

My practice is rooted in the experience of motherhood, a journey that has transformed both my identity and my creative process. Since becoming a mother, I’ve explored how this new role encompasses acts of sacrifice, protection, nurturing, and unconditional giving. Through my work with clay, I express these complexities in sculptural baskets, which have become a central motif in my practice. The basket, a symbol of containment, offering, and abundance, serves as a reflection of the emotional and physical labor that defines motherhood. Baskets are vessels of care. They hold, carry, protect, and present. They are deeply utilitarian, but also symbolic. 

Through my sculptures, I explore the balance between the nurturing, domestic aspects of maternal life and the profound strength that lies within this role. In the tender chaos of motherhood, there exists a quiet resilience; a delicate balance between bearing the 

weight of it all and seeking moments of personal transformation amidst the overwhelm. I aim to honor both the quiet and the loud aspects of motherhood… the softness and the strength, the containment and the release. The sculptures become quiet monuments to the careful work of mothering, to the repetition of domestic labor, and to the abundance that can exist even in monotony.