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Artist Statement ~
This most recent body of
work represents a significant divergence for me from the ceramic art I
have created thus far. Part of the impetus has been from loss through
recent death of loved ones. In moving into and through my grief, I realized
a strange concurrence of feelings, essentially a different awareness.
In part I could more profoundly acknowledge that everything will become
dust or ash one day ~ whether by slow or fast passage of time, worn by
wind, water, erosion, decay, fire.
Yet, while everything turns to dust... a stone, the skin and bones of
my hand, termite-eaten or ocean-tossed wood... still there is an undeniable
element of aliveness about these things. While they will ultimately reach
a point where they seem lifeless, beauty and vitality somehow remain ~
the driftwood fragment was a tree reaching upward for light, downward
for sustenance, the dust of stone as part of the earth that forms into
clay, the someday limp hand having also sculpted that clay, carved, played
music. It’s as though all these things are both death and life intertwined.
This sense becomes stronger for me, first as I sculpt and carve the clay,
sometimes marking it with termite-eaten wood, and then as I juxtapose
my clay pieces with other discovered pieces of wood and stone. Even in
their still, quiet and seemingly lifeless forms, I perceive a beauty and
even power and motion in these pieces, whether graceful or jagged lines,
rough or smooth surfaces, solid and sturdy or delicate and fragile.
In working with and combining these various media I have found myself
both feeling personally less contained and also creating art pieces that
leap out of boundaries I might otherwise structure them within. More and
more I find myself being drawn to the beauty in asymmetry, and welcoming
the transitory, organic nature of things.
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Peace calla ~
This piece (December 2002), was the first of a series of multi-tiled wall
murals which incorporate copper and silver metals, sometimes wood, as well
as more three-dimensional sculpting. I find the calla lily to be one of
the most graceful, sensual flowers. Whether I'm sculpting one flower or
several for a "callas entwined" mural I enjoy helping each flower
unfold ~ they are all different and unique. I call it the peace calla in
part because the vertical word inscribed on the center tile, "Siochain",
is the Old Gaelic word meaning "peace". |
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