About Anna Salibello

Born and raised in Brooklyn, NY, Anna Salibello has settled on studio pottery as her permanent career. Earlier she was an instructor of English at the high school and college level. She then found clay as her passion. Her early pottery years led to her founding an architectural ceramic tile business. There she could blend her ceramic love with the challenge of business.

Anna Salibello’s most notable project was making mosaics and tile for the restoration of the New York City subway system. Her work decorates many subway stations.

But the magnetic pull of personal expression in ceramics won out. Anna has rediscovered her true passion in throwing and hand building pottery on the wheel and more recently, hand building functional and decorative sculptural pieces.

After exposure in Japan to the masters, her work has shown the strong influence of the Japanese aesthetic. She is happiest making work in a distinctively organic style, purposely echoing the imperfections found in life.

Her studio is on Long Beach Island, NJ, the ocean in sight, reminding her of her early life in Brooklyn, very close to the ocean, where inspiration surrounds her. Home again, she feels, in several ways.

Artist’s Statement

As I enter the studio I try to be mindful of images or emotions pushing themselves into my consciousness and eventually into my hands. I feel I’m subject to the conversation between those shapes, the clay, and my hands. A three-way conversation.

In the end, often the process itself wins by dictating the direction. The clay itself pushes the process. I sometimes feel like an observer rather than a creator. Just doing my job, as I’m told.

The resulting pieces have passed through my personal filter to result in organic expressions. The evolution of those images has brought me the exhilarating freedom of change. My work welcomes and expresses that passage. It has been a trip.

My current “stop” on that passage reflects the Japanese aesthetic. That began with a tour of the Japanese masters’ studios two years ago. Their organic artistry often presented in the spirit of imperfection suits me. After living many decades, I’m more aware than ever of the imperfections we live with. But there is beauty in those imperfections, life as it is.