About

Hi there, I’m Elizabeth Friedman, Izzy for short, the hands behind Iz Formed Ceramics. I make sculptures and functional pieces that are meant to be touched, held, and lived with. I consider how perception and internal monologue shape everyday interaction, decision making, and how we relate to the world at large. My work explores what our expectations and involuntary reactions reveal about our core beliefs. Raised on Martha Stewart Living and MTV with a family spread over cultures and continents, I’ve always had an intense fascination with decoding all the intricate, and often contradictory, expectations around duty, behavior, and aesthetics. What makes something good, useful, cool or even beautiful and why does shift so much depending on whom you ask?

I use clay to explore these thoughts because, as a medium, it remembers every press and shift, but it also takes on a life of its own once it enters the kiln to be fired.  I take a lot of inspiration from cycles in nature, fog rolling into the San Francisco bay and hills scorched by wildfires along the coast, as well as collective conversations about idealized pasts and from the ways we try (and sometimes fail) to control change. In my practice each piece is part planned design and part surprise execution. Sometimes my own expectations and reactions to what comes out of the kiln provokes me to re-examine my own internalized beliefs, and that’s what keeps me creating.

In the end, I hope my work invites a moment of pause—where you can notice texture, form, and movement, and maybe recognize your reactions reveal about the beliefs or expectations you hold at your core.