About
Cathleen Sullivan's Biography
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Cathleen Sullivan is a multidisciplinary artist, educator, mentor, and founder of Treasure Coast Pottery in Port St. Lucie, Florida. Her work spans ceramics, printmaking, encaustic, mixed media, collage, and painting, reflecting a lifelong fascination with process, material exploration, and layered visual storytelling.
Originally trained in ceramics, Sullivan's practice has evolved to incorporate printmaking, encaustic, oil and cold wax, mixed media, and contemporary abstract collage. Her work has been exhibited throughout Florida and New York and includes public art installations and artwork displayed in government and community venues. Her encaustic painting Through the Eyes of a Storm was licensed by Port St. Lucie Area Regional Transit and reproduced on a public transit vehicle throughout the city.
Sullivan holds a Bachelor of Arts in Visual Arts from Empire State University, graduating summa cum laude. She has studied with nationally recognized artists in ceramics, printmaking, encaustic, mixed media, and abstraction, and has participated in workshops and immersive programs throughout the United States, Canada, Indonesia, and Italy.
In 2022, Sullivan founded Treasure Coast Pottery, a multidisciplinary community arts studio that has grown into a vibrant creative hub for artists of all ages and experience levels. Through teaching, mentorship, exhibitions, homeschool programming, and community partnerships, she has helped create opportunities for artistic growth and connection throughout the Treasure Coast region.
Sullivan currently serves as Secretary of the St. Lucie Cultural Alliance and remains committed to fostering creativity, arts education, and cultural engagement through both her studio practice and community leadership
Artist Statement
My work lives at the intersection of process, material, and intuition. I move fluidly between painting, printmaking, encaustic, mixed media, and sculptural clay, allowing each discipline to inform the next. I am drawn to techniques that build in layers—visually, physically, and emotionally. Surface, rhythm, movement, and the interplay of opacity and transparency are central to how I construct each piece.
Curiosity fuels everything I do. Whether working with copper plates, wax, glazes, paper, or pigment, I immerse myself fully in each medium before carrying those discoveries forward into new work. My studio practice is experimental and intuitive, shaped through underpainting, repeated mark-making, print pulls, pattern, and additive and reductive processes. I rarely begin with a fixed outcome in mind, allowing the work to emerge through layering, revision, and risk.
Color has become one of my most powerful visual languages. In recent years, my palette has grown increasingly bold and unapologetic. Joy, energy, rhythm, and celebration surface again and again in the work, often without conscious intention. What once existed in quieter tones now arrives with vibrancy, depth, and dimensional presence. My compositions aim to hold both structure and spontaneity at once—controlled chaos grounded by formal balance.
Clay remains foundational to my artistic identity. It taught me form, patience, chemistry, and the beauty of transformation through fire. That understanding now flows directly into my two-dimensional work. I think about glazes and pigment in the same breath, about surface as landscape, and about the tension between control and surrender as essential to both.
At the heart of my practice is a belief that art is a lifelong conversation—between materials, disciplines, and people. Teaching and mentorship have become inseparable from making. The studio is a place of exchange, where artists at every stage bring fresh questions, ideas, and challenges. Through teaching, mentoring, and community-building, I continually return to the fundamentals with renewed curiosity. The shared creative momentum that emerges from these relationships has become an essential part of both my practice and my purpose.Bottom of Form
Ultimately, my work is about connection: to process, material, joy, and the collective energy that emerges when people create together. Every layered surface holds a history of decisions, revisions, and discoveries—quiet evidence of time, motion, and the freedom found through sustained exploration.