About the Artist

Ben Hirschkoff

When Ben Hirschkoff graduated from a San Diego, California high school, he was sure his path was to be an editorial cartoonist.  He grew up drawing, but when Ben moved to northern California to attend Humboldt State University, he quickly lost interest in cartooning and gravitated toward ceramic sculpture, incorporating found objects.  He relocated to San Francisco and developed two distinct bodies of ceramic sculpture. In 2004, Ben was admitted to the Ceramic Arts MFA program at the University of Washington.  He has been a member of Soil Artist Run Gallery since 2006.

Ben’s contribution to The Window Art Project at Pharmaca uses scraps of salvaged acrylic sheets, resin, steel pipe, and paperstone. These pieces are used to build fragmented, yet graceful, representations of a cloud that seemingly float, even though anchored to a system of plumbing.  During the last four years, he has developed and exhibited a series of interpretive sculptures and collages based on a landscape as an archetypal and utilitarian object.  He builds pieces in a quick and often simple way, using common materials found in hardware stores and salvage yards.