2025
BIO
Rebeccah Pailes-Friedman is an artist and designer who sees art and design as inseparable, both rooted in the pursuit of unique perspectives and creative solutions. Throughout her career, Rebeccah has been driven by a deep curiosity to find inspiration in unexpected places and to draw connections between seemingly unrelated ideas. For her, the beauty of design lies in its ability to transform everyday experiences into something extraordinary, while art brings a deeper emotional resonance to function and form.
With over 25 years of teaching at Pratt Institute, Rebeccah instills this philosophy in her students, encouraging them to blur the boundaries between disciplines and explore the interplay of creativity, technology, and humanity. In her work as the founder of Interwoven Design Group, she leads projects that fuse wearable technology, material science, and human-centered design across industries like healthcare, consumer products, and mobility.
Her philosophy extends to her artistic practice, where she creates ceramic sculptures inspired by nature’s forms and alchemical processes. This work reflects her belief that true innovation comes from allowing intuition and discovery to shape the creative process, whether designing for NASA or crafting large-scale sculptural pieces.
Rebeccah’s approach is rooted in the belief that life and work should constantly evolve—through exploration, collaboration, and an openness to new ideas. Whether working with students, clients, or creating in her studio, she strives to bridge art and design, fostering a holistic, interconnected creative practice.
ARTIST STATEMENT
My work is a response to a world in flux. The Scorched Earth series emerges from an urgent confrontation with climate collapse—a material and philosophical reckoning with landscapes pushed to the edge. In my ceramic practice, I use fire, pressure, and chemical reaction to echo ecological transformation: cracked surfaces, blistered glazes, scorched and ruptured forms that speak to both destruction and resilience.
I’m inspired by what time leaves behind—weathered surfaces, rust, geological layering, the subtle traces of wear that tell stories of survival. I document these details in my daily life, photographing fragments of texture, decay, and transition. These images make their way into my sketchbook, becoming the basis for experiments in clay and glaze. Each vessel becomes a site of exploration—an attempt to materialize the tension between ruin and regeneration.
Drawing on a lineage of craft rooted in earth and transformation, I use ceramics to question the boundaries between nature and artifice, permanence and impermanence. I see the work as both witness and proposition: a way to reflect the times we’re living through, but also to imagine new systems and ways of being.
In shaping these objects, I’m speculating on futures marked by adaptation, survival, and strange new beauty. My vessels resist erasure, insist on presence, and invite viewers to consider how we might inhabit what comes next.
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Academic CV
Tableware Catalogue
Studio
595 Madison Street
Brooklyn, NY 11221
410 Water Street Road
Hudson, NY 12538
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