Helen Kunzman is a potter who creates wheel-thrown and altered vessels. Her work combines the aesthetics of East and West. She is influenced by the profound tea bowls of Japan with its interplay of craftsmanship and raw nature — and the British ceramic artists Lucie Rie and Hans Coper — and the post-minimalist conceptual artist Eva Hesse. She states "sometimes I'll begin to throw a pot and stretch and push the clay off-center — almost to its breaking point. The broken surfaces remind me of the earth itself - a reminder of life's fragility and my personal memento mori". Helen Kunzman has also been an art conservator of early artworks on paper and specialist in the field of old master drawings and the Rajput and Islamic paintings of India since 1982. She is the co-founder of Artifacts Collections of New York. She lives and works in South Salem N.Y.