Brooklyn-based multidisciplinary artist PD Packard develops an evolving series of Soldier-Head vessels that brings together ceramics, silkscreen, embossing, handmade stamps, wood firing and, most recently, the physical integration of printed paper and clay into a single object.
PD Packard began the Soldier-Head series in 2023 with a clear structural form and an open question: what could happen if the disciplines that had shaped her practice across a career in printmaking, textile and surface design were brought into direct conversation with ceramic sculpture? Three years later, the series has its own answer. The figures have accumulated silkscreen, embossing through an etching press, handmade stamps pressed into clay, wood firing, pattern and, in the most recent works from 2026, printed paper physically combined with clay as part of the same object.
The two newest pieces, KNOWING and The Straight Line To Love, are the first fully integrated paper-and-clay works in the series: ceramic vessels whose surfaces carry printed and embossed paper as material components rather than surface decoration. The visual language of print and pattern has become inseparable from the physical presence of the ceramic form.
The Soldier figure at the centre of all of it is not incidental. “The Soldier represents my commitment to standing firm in my art and design amid the forces of time, material, circumstance, and change,” Packard says. The figures embody fear, courage, protection, love and conflict, and above all loyalty and resilience: qualities that the title LOYAL TO THE MARK refers to directly. The mark in question is both the physical impression left by every process of making and the deeper commitment to remaining true to a creative vision across time and change. “I think of these figures as vessels not only in their physical form, but as vessels for ideas,” she says.
Each work in the series is unique. There are no editions. The pieces are made entirely by Packard in her Brooklyn studio, with firing at studios and kilns across Brooklyn and beyond. The series continues.
PD Packard is a Brooklyn-based artist and graduate of Central Saint Martins whose work is held in collections including The Museum of Modern Art Franklin Furnace Art Book Collection, the Boston Public Library and the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts.
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LOYAL TO THE MARK, 2023 to present. Unique sculptural vessels and mixed-media works. Materials include Cone 10 clay, gas reduction and wood firing, silkscreen, etching press embossing, handmade stamps, printed paper, pattern. All images: PD Packard.
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