This July, the Hoffman Gallery brings together painter Heidi Keith and ceramic sculptor Hans Miles.

Thursday - Sunday | July 2nd - July 25th

You're invited to a free opening reception on Friday, July 3, from 3:00 to 5:00pm. Come meet the artists, see the work up close, and start your holiday weekend with us!

Heidi Keith paints and teaches studio art in Portland, and she's spent the last decade working in large-scale ink on paper. She's drawn to ink for its permanence and immediacy, the way it holds every gesture in place and resists being fussed over. She earned a Bachelor and Masters degree from Portland State University. Her work is informed by her community and the land of the Pacific Northwest.

Obscure and Reveal

In my work, I explore embodiment, identity, and the search for generative connection within community - experiences that are both deeply personal and widely shared. At the core of my practice is a sense of vulnerability: an acknowledgment that our bodies, our vehicles through life, are fragile. They can betray us, empower us, and ultimately remind us of our impermanence.

Our bodies also carry the weight of societal expectations, often without our consent. At the same time, we navigate an intimate and fragile relationship with our own ephemerality. This dual awareness shapes how we move through the world and how we see ourselves within it.

Beautiful and grotesque, sensory and laden with meaning, our bodies obscure and reveal us.

Hans Miles makes human-scaled ceramic sculpture from his studio on the southwest Washington coast, where he's been the lead instructor at the community studio Ilwaco Artworks since earning a Master of Fine Arts in Ceramics from the University of Notre Dame in 2024. He spent five years as coordinator of the Art and Industry residency program at Mission Clay, a ceramic sewer pipe factory in Phoenix, Arizona, following his undergraduate degree. The experience of working within an active industrial ceramics facility deeply shaped his understanding of scale, labor, and material systems, and led him toward increasingly ambitious sculptural work.

Fluctuat nec mergitur

This body of work presents the viewer with a gathering of human-scaled ceramic forms that feel simultaneously corporeal and architectural. Living on the southwest Washington coast, I’ve become increasingly aware to the way the landscape steadily reclaims what people build: salt air consuming metal, fog softening edges, wood collapsing back into the ground, entire structures slowly surrendering to moisture, wind, and time. That gradual unraveling informs the formal language and conceptual framework of the work.

The sculptures exist in a space between recognition and ambiguity. Their forms suggest self-ownership, fragments of an event, or bodies interrupted. Though materially dense and static, they hold a kind of latent energy—as if caught in an ongoing process of weathering, swelling, compression, or collapse. Their heavily worked surfaces invite a tactile relationship, carrying traces of pressure, abrasion, accumulation, and decay.

I’m interested in the instability of objects: the way materials can appear permanent while actively deteriorating, shifting, and returning to the landscape around them. Clay feels uniquely suited to this tension. It moves from soft earth to stone through heat yet still retains an uncanny vulnerability—capable of appearing exhausted, protective, or animate. The sculptures operate as “nearly known” forms, lingering at the edge of identification while resisting fixed interpretation.

My practice is rooted in labor-intensive, intrasubjective processes that emphasize accumulation, perception and reconstruction. Through ceramic sculpture, I explore the porous boundary between body and environment, permanence and entropy, and the quiet but persistent ways that matter records time.