Preview
Creation Date
2016
Description
Materials: Stoneware
Dimensions: Variable
Project Advisor: Meghan Sullivan
Year of Graduation: 2016
Medium
Ceramics
Rights
Copyright for this work is held by the artist.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License.
COinS
Artist Statement
As people we have a contradictory relationship with the natural world. We are intertwined with the earth and its organic processes. This powerful link makes nature an inevitable muse for human thought and innovation. However, as we try to replicate and control it, it mutates from its original form. Sometimes our intervention in nature leads to a destruction of it. Earthly Objects explores the transformation from natural object to ceramic sculpture and the contradictions that lie within.
Seedpods, coral, fungi, and the geology of rock formations inspire these hand-built ceramic sculptures. They are manifestations of my sensory memory meant to invoke the nostalgia of exploration. While the sculptures capture a likeness to nature, our understanding of the objects as ceramic exposes the contradiction between the organic and the manipulated. In order to emphasize this, the work was created with the intention of being held. Through the intimacy of scale, the viewer tactilely and visually experiences the objects. This is intended to remind us of our sense of childhood exploration in the outside world, of a time when we compelled ourselves to look closer. In the vastness we discovered small things: rocks, sticks, and leaves. We took them and changed them, drawing upon their mysteries to create coveted objects of our imagination.