Creating is not about control, but about listening—allowing the material to speak and guide the form.
In my work, I explore the hidden histories of women, feminist reinterpretations of myth, and the spiritual resonance of materiality. Through layered textiles, modular ceramics and found heirlooms, I build figurative forms that are both beautiful and unsettling, shaped by what is visible and what resists being seen.
Materials are central to both my process and my conceptual framework. I often source heirlooms from estate sales or use objects passed down through my own family, honoring the lives of women whose stories were rarely documented in books but endured in domestic artifacts and quiet acts of making. I view materials as vessels of memory and intuition. Creating is not about control, but about listening—allowing the material to speak and guide the form.
I am drawn to the ways women’s identities have been shaped, silenced, and mythologized over time. Though we can never fully know the entirety of even one woman’s story, the act of making becomes, for me, a form of reclamation—a way to hold space for what was lost, imagined, or never told.
Peyton Pickenpaugh is a New Orleans-based artist whose work explores feminine identity, ancestral memory, and spiritual transformation through fiber, ceramics, and found objects. Raised in a potter’s studio by a spiritual seeker and educator, she later earned a master’s degree in history and spent over 15 years teaching before fully committing to her art practice. In 2023 she began incorporating heirlooms, natural materials, and deconstructed textiles into her ceramic practice in order to investigate suppressed histories and reimagine feminine archetypes.
Her process is deeply intuitive, guided by a reverence for myth, mediumship and the unseen narratives passed down through women's lives and lineages. By layering material, memory and meaning, she constructs work that are both haunting and hallowed. Peyton’s work has been exhibited in San Francisco, Massachusetts, and New Orleans.
EDUCATION
University of Massachusetts (2024-2025), Post-Baccalaureate, Ceramics
University of Mississippi (2000-2002), Masters of History/Curriculum and Instruction
University of Mississippi (1996-2000), Bachelor of Arts, Major: History/Art History
SOLO EXHIBITIONS
Ancestral Magic, Floor 13: New Orleans, LA 2024
GROUP EXHIBITIONS
And Now for Something New, LeMieux: New Orleans, LA 2025
Transitions, The Front Gallery: Dartmouth, MA 2025
Louisiana Contemporary, Ogden Museum of Southern Art: New Orleans, LA 2024
How ya Doin, Merchant House: New Orleans, LA 2024
Ceramics Now, Acadiana Center for the Arts: Lafayette, LA 2024
Magnolia Gala, Ogden Museum: New Orleans, LA 2024
3D Mississippi, Studio Waveland: Waveland, MS 2023
Canebrake, City Art Cooperative Gallery: San Francisco, CA 2019
ArtLauch, SomArts Cultural Center: San Francisco, CA 2018, 2014
Precita Eyes, Minna Gallery: San Francisco CA 2012
WORKSHOPS & CONFERENCES
NCECA Coalescence (2024)
Wood and Wool with Graeme Priddle and Lisa Klakulak (2024)
Paperclay Workshop with Rebecca Hutchinson (2023)
Sculptural Embroidery with Meredith Woolnough (2023)
Creating Space with Mapo Kinnord (2023)
Pushing the Clay with Lora Rust (2022)
Alabama Clay Conference (2023, 2014)
