The Soft Earth

The Soft Earth is Speaking

Like us, like everything — rocks, sediments, pigments, all shaped by time. I added firing — the work is here. So am I.

Then and Now

I never quite know how people find their way here — once, someone tracked me down after finding a piece at an estate sale in Colorado. Educator, student, scientist, collector, speaker-seeker, or simply curious: however you landed here, I'm maintaining this site for you to dig into, learn from, and share.

Ceramic Work

Frequently Asked Questions

Paintings and Field Notes

Joan looking at paint on glass taken by VicThor 2026.jpg

Meet Joan Lederman

Trained as a painter, then found by ceramics: 45 years with hands in clay, 20 of them firing oceanic materials into ceramic glazes. People found me: writers, collectors, and curious minds with ideas for how the work might meet the world. The work reached Al Gore, Emperor Akihito, Vinton Cerf, Sylvia Earle, Bob Ballard, and Marie Tharpe. It also went into the hands of everyday people worldwide. It was written about in Nature, NPR, Oxford University Press, Gizmodo, Resurgence, and Ceramic Review.

Now, back to painting. What I do shifts with the seasons and the world. Some days I'm in the I don't know. Some days I'm pondering ecosanitation and death, or PRP and physical therapy, or whether I'll get a swim in today.

A work in progress, like all of us: exhaling, inhaling.

Learn More

“Your tireless effort to secure bottom sediments with some tiny fossil animals from the lakes, bays, and seas of our planet is serious scientific stuff. Your next phase of arranging these artistically into a lasting pattern of glazed stoneware is a superb combination of science and art.”

– Marie Tharp, geologist and oceanographic cartographer
"I call it contingency thinking when I visualize what each glaze might do in a range of temperatures and atmospheres, on concave or convex surfaces, and how calligraphic writing will survive when the glazes flow. I think on multiple, sometimes parallel tracks. If this, then that; if this, then that. I project likelihoods as my livelihood."

– Joan Lederman
"Joan's art, her practice, is for her a mode of inquiry into science, but as a non-scientist — as a person, as an amateur, Joan's art, to me, simultaneously tells the story of someone who experiences science as an outsider, as so many of us do, and as someone who experiences the Earth as an insider, as so few of us can."

— Randall Bass, at Georgetown University event.
"As the number of materials I use increases, my mental agility increases. I bond with materials by concentrating and by memorizing their visual identities at various stages – being present with them is a way I love them. If I maintain attention, I can decide things faster than my mind can track chains of logic."

– Joan Lederman