Chris Gustin is an Professor Emeritus of the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth. He received his BFA in ceramics from the Kansas City Art Institute and an MFA degree from the New York State College of Ceramics. After twenty years of teaching and working with hundreds of undergraduate and graduate students, Chris retired from academia in the summer of 1999 to devote his full time and energies to his studio work and tile production company. “The skin of the clay holds the invisible interior of the vessel. How I manipulate my forms "around" that air, constraining it, enclosing it, or letting it expand and swell can allow analogy and metaphor to enter into the work.”