SHAPES
(2016 - 19)
In the end, as a clay artist the themes surrounding my work have come to directly speak to this use of material. There is an interesting situation in working with clay, where one is forced to pay attention to how the material reacts to being manipulated. This conversation between action and reaction necessitates a certain openness as initial intentions must be altered. While I believe most artists of specific media would attest to a similar experience while making, I think this clay and ceramics heighten this situation as their material properties are less flexible in certain ways.
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Along side this focus on materiality, moving to South Florida had a large impact on my work due to the conflicting environmental aspects. This work then came to be conceptually grounded by the ideas surrounding what was coined by William Letharby, in Architecture, Mysticism and Myth (2005), as the, “urban utopia,” which terms the creation of the objects structured within coordinated, aestheticized environments as “imagined facts.” In this sense, my latest projects have borrowed from Letharby’s ideas, mostly through materials like resin, and auto paint, which create industrial surfaces that speak to the pristine and immaculate in search of the utopian. Coupled with this is the use of clay, which speaks to the natural and organic. To me these two conflicting viewpoints summarize my experiences of South Florida, perspectives of utopic visions, nature, and the intersection of ‘dirty’ reality.
