Allen Moe (Anacortes) is a ceramics artist. After receiving his BA in ecology at UC Berkeley in 1970, Allen spent ten years working seasonally as a park ranger in Alaska’s Denali National Park and as a seabird ecologist in the Gulf of Alaska, while homesteading in the Northwestern Brooks Mountain Range. Living in the bush and being influenced by Eskimo culture, he became familiar with processing skins; he began to hand-build pots, covering them with caribou or fish skins, stitching them with sinew, and firing them in simple wood fires with sawdust. Allen first showed his unusual pots in galleries in Fairbanks, Alaska.
Now living on the Skagit River delta for the past 16 years in a duck shack without electricity and accessible only by boat, he continues to work with ceramic pots and found animal skins and bones in his sculptural works. He recently built his own studio space on nearby Guemes Island. Allen has shown his work at various venues around the Northwest, including recent shows at Kittredge Gallery (University of Puget Sound), Shoreline College Gallery, and Port Angeles Fine Arts Center.
As part of his Fellowship’s Meet the Artist requirements, Allen was the featured artist at the 45th annual Anacortes Arts Festival. This was the first year that the festival highlighted an outstanding Skagit County artist with an exhibit in the John L. Scott Focus Gallery. The festival featured a street block of “working artists” where Allen set up making his pots. He had his kiln (a five-gallon can), a bag of tea-tanned chicken feet and fish skins, and photographs of him working in the field as well as of his past work. Down the block was the warehouse gallery where Allen had his work on display. Thousands saw his work.
...I couldn’t have possibly undertaken this without the Artist Trust Fellowship… I was able to focus-in and do the best work I’ve ever done and have it seen by hundreds of people…. It was an extraordinary experience from which I emerged energized to keep working. And maybe there are a few people who are now seeing the world around them a bit more fully, looking closer, inclined maybe to at least LOOK at tripe.