About

Greg Volker was born in Stuttgart Germany and grew up in St Louis Park Mn. Attended the University of Minnesota for his BFA and left Minneapolis for San Francisco in 1990 to attend graduate school at San Francisco Art Institute. He spent 28 years in SF, Oakland and Sonoma Valley as an artist, musician, and builder. In 2018 he moved back to Minneapolis and set up shop in the California Building in the Northeast Arts District where he had a studio in ’90 when he left for California.

While in undergraduate school he started working in Curtis Hoard’s studio as an assistant which gave him a lot of great experience into what a working artist looks like. In and after grad school he began to work in several prominent artists’ studios as an assistant including John Roloff, Don Rich, Charles Splady, and Bruce Beasley. A great opportunity came along to work with Andy Goldsworthy on a large ceramic project at the Runnymede Sculpture Farm in Woodside Ca. He built a kiln on site and fired the large ceramic pieces Goldsworthy made from the clay they found and refined on-site.

Volker’s Pottery works cover a lot of ground. Starting with the Aerial Landscape Series he was taken with viewing farmlands while flying. The shapes made by irrigation, planting and harvesting along with the waterways’ squiggly lines moving through translate into strange logos and patterns when put onto the pots. The Dots and Lines Series is an abstraction of those shapes in the Aerial Landscape Series combined with his love of mid-century modern aesthetics. The Currents and Flow Series harkens back to his time mucking about in the pond behind the house where he grew up and Minnehaha Creek which traversed his home town of St. Louis Park. The lazy motion of the aquatic plants flowing so gently in the currents have been rediscovered since his move back to Minneapolis in 2018. 

The Cup Holder Series comes from his sculptural work which included the little clay people crawling, wondering and laying about on the bases of his “log” pieces. During his treatment for Colon cancer, the figures where something he could make and carrying the cups they are a reference to the sisyphusian experience.