Art with spirit—this phrase defines the core of April DeConick’s exuberant artistic practice. A multidisciplinary artist, she works in clay, fiber, and paint to explore the relationship between feeling, form, and movement. She treats her materials as living surfaces—stamping, pressing, and pulling into life forms that exist nowhere, not even in her imagination. Her organic artworks emerge through an intuitive, energetic physical process—sometimes shaped with her whole body.

“The materials are not just tools—they are my collaborators, my teachers. They know things I don’t. I follow their lead.”

A long-time professor in the study of religion at Rice University, April has spent decades writing about mysticism. Over time, she came to recognize that some truths are inexpressible—they become known only when experienced. Her artistic practice emerged as a way to express the indescribable wonder of being and becoming.

She embraces wild, non-traditional stitching and mark-making techniques that resist formality, allowing emotional honesty and raw expression to emerge through texture, gesture, and process. Each piece is a material meditation on presence, change, and the fluid boundaries between inner and outer experience.  Her finished pieces are highly tactile, inviting touch and contemplation.  She hopes to encourage viewers to consider how we shape ourselves in an ongoing radical process of making and becoming.

Across all mediums, she is drawn to the aesthetics of care—what might be called hygge—and to craft traditions long undervalued in the fine art world. Her work reclaims these materials and methods as vital, contemporary tools for meaning-making beyond language.