Artist’s Statement
We are impermanent. We are surrounded by constant change, and left with the remnants of what was and used to be. I was made aware of this at a young age with the death of my father’s father, and have spent several years of my college experience faced with that fact again, and again with more losses of those I’ve admired and loved deeply. My work revolves around, and tries to analyze the state of our condition in such impermanence. I’ve always been drawn to subjects like fossils, mummies, and the ideas they brought forth of mortality, as well as our timeless strive to overcome it. In a way, they are a record. In a way, despite our impermanence, they surpass time.
I create portions of the female figure in an identification of self—creating a personal connection between the pieces and myself, often building up the entire form whole, and then tearing away portions of it. My work is a constant juxtaposing force of creation and destruction, the record of which is recorded in the bisque and glaze. My surfaces often play up and twist the sense of the clay as flesh, ranging from terra sig to a crackled glaze, while also harkening to more fossil and rock derived surfaces to give also a state of permanence. Through it all, I am exploring not only the whole of our shared mortality, but coming to terms with the idea of it all in concerns to myself. It’s all self-made fossils of contemplation in the fact that I too will someday be little more than dust, and these pieces are my remnants—my mummies to overcome it in some small way.
The first contemporary artist that inspired me both in medium and form was Kathy Venter and her Immersion series—terra cotta human forms suspended as though in water and in quiet depth. There is something uniquely unsettling and yet enthralling to see things so weighted suddenly proposed to be weightless and suspended in this dark, unseen water. My second major influence is another figurative ceramicist, Nan Smith, who creates more introverted and quiet situations with her female figures. They explore the intuitive, more introverted mentality of the woman, trying to find that inner moment of reflective silence.
We are impermanent. We are surrounded by constant change, and left with the remnants of what was and used to be. I was made aware of this at a young age with the death of my father’s father, and have spent several years of my college experience faced with that fact again, and again with more losses of those I’ve admired and loved deeply. My work revolves around, and tries to analyze the state of our condition in such impermanence. I’ve always been drawn to subjects like fossils, mummies, and the ideas they brought forth of mortality, as well as our timeless strive to overcome it. In a way, they are a record. In a way, despite our impermanence, they surpass time.
I create portions of the female figure in an identification of self—creating a personal connection between the pieces and myself, often building up the entire form whole, and then tearing away portions of it. My work is a constant juxtaposing force of creation and destruction, the record of which is recorded in the bisque and glaze. My surfaces often play up and twist the sense of the clay as flesh, ranging from terra sig to a crackled glaze, while also harkening to more fossil and rock derived surfaces to give also a state of permanence. Through it all, I am exploring not only the whole of our shared mortality, but coming to terms with the idea of it all in concerns to myself. It’s all self-made fossils of contemplation in the fact that I too will someday be little more than dust, and these pieces are my remnants—my mummies to overcome it in some small way.
The first contemporary artist that inspired me both in medium and form was Kathy Venter and her Immersion series—terra cotta human forms suspended as though in water and in quiet depth. There is something uniquely unsettling and yet enthralling to see things so weighted suddenly proposed to be weightless and suspended in this dark, unseen water. My second major influence is another figurative ceramicist, Nan Smith, who creates more introverted and quiet situations with her female figures. They explore the intuitive, more introverted mentality of the woman, trying to find that inner moment of reflective silence.
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