Galleries

2018 BFA Exhibition at Main Street Arts in Clifton Springs, NY.

I have been told not to touch artwork. Be respectful. Look but don’t touch.  My exhibition encourages you to touch and experience the work so feel free to pick up the pillows, poke the wall hangings and allow your curiosity to guide you through the whole exhibition.

Texture inspires me. Even before I began work in ceramics I have always been obsessed with creating tactile information. I am a knitter, a soft goods designer, a seamstress. Ceramics emerges as a unifying passion because it allows me to capture the attributes that inspire me in fabric. The life of each of my pieces began as fabric- no sketching or pre-planning. I play with and manipulate the fabric until a desired form and texture has been created. I then cast directly off of the fabric. This method leaves a direct imprint of a flexible material, immortalizing a moment of its fleeting lifetime, to a solid sculptural form. Fabric is flexible and temporary while ceramics is hard and permanent.

My work utilizes two permanent mediums: clay and plaster, to create two groups of objects: the pillows and the wall hangings. Each of them are inspired by tactual sensory experience and the fabric they were born from. The pillows are cute, small, and intimate: my intention is to keep the viewer fixated on wanting to touch them. There’s a need to verify that the pillows are, in fact, solid. The wall hangings are a more public expression of the same dissonance. A flat object that seems to have multiple dimensions or may look like it has the texture of lace is actually a flat slab of clay. A heavy, solid pillow? A fuzzy wall hanging?  The unexpected relationships between the viewers’ visual and tactile senses may create discomfort, but that sense of wonder is also what keeps you coming back.

Questioning how something is made, wanting to understand it by touching and feeling the piece is the highest compliment. I want the viewer to pick up the work and experience the shock of the misconception. Blurring the expectations of plaster, ceramics, and fabric as individual mediums creates a sense of mystery and curiosity. So please, don’t resist the temptation to touch and enjoy the satisfaction of handling the work.