by Carole Epp | Mar 29, 2014 | call for entry, emerging artist, job posting, monday morning eye candy, movie day, residency opportunity, show us your influences, technical tuesday
Artist Statement:
The most recent body of work has stemmed from a
kind of ceramic folklore involving peoples’ initial discovery of the
material. Before people fired pots they were a mobile society of basket
makers. As they began to cultivate the land and harvest a greater
surplus of grain they required more containers that would be resistant
to rodents and the open air. They lined their baskets with clay and in a
serendipitous event a fire destroyed most of their
material possessions but left them with some insight. The interior of
that basket became the first ceramic pot. Beyond its potential as a
prototype for their future, in its hardened exterior bore the
impressions of their past. It became a fossil to an ephemeral and mobile
society; a momento to a new culture that would seek eternal life
carving their name in earth.
The range of information this object says about
their society’s soft culture has lead me to find new meaning in our
material culture. If one can deduce that a mobile society produces
impermanent objects from ephemeral materials, and sedentary society
produces more permanent objects from archival materials; than what is to
be inferred from a culture which produces disposable objects from
permanent materials?
zachbalousek.com
by Carole Epp | Mar 15, 2014 | call for entry, emerging artist, job posting, monday morning eye candy, movie day, residency opportunity, show us your influences, technical tuesday
Within my studio
practice I am exploring the self and mechanisms we use to protect ourselves. My
research of defense mechanisms and self-presentations within psychology has led
me to examine human emotional responses and how they work within social-interactions.
I am investigating the unique layers of our identity and how we project
fragments of the self to others through behavior or impulses. One way I have
chosen to execute this concept is through a barrier or shield. The forms allow
the viewer to experience multiple perspectives that are present in human
relations when instinctive behavior patterns come in to play. This continues to
address my interest in human’s need for order and control because the ego is
trying to organize behavior within social environments.
The delicate
nature of the ceramic forms highlights the sometimes-fragile fragments of our
ego. Some elements imply a softness or approachability while others suggest
precaution. Repetition of these forms is also signifying habitual patterns and
reoccurrences in our everyday experiences.
In addition to
psychology, architecture has been a significant influence in my work. Both
mashrabiyyas and muqarnas have been pertinent in my understanding of decorative
motifs and their functions within architecture. I believe there is a strong
interest in these structures because I have associated them to the body and I
continuing to contemplate how they can function as a psychological state.
– Nina Kawar
ninakawar.weebly.com
by Carole Epp | Mar 9, 2014 | call for entry, emerging artist, job posting, monday morning eye candy, movie day, residency opportunity, show us your influences, technical tuesday
The
table is the place where a need becomes a want. Something we have to
do—eat—becomes something we care to do—dine, and then something we care
to do becomes something we try to do with grace. Eating together is the
civilizing act, we take urges and tame them into tastes.
—Adam Gopnik
The
table comes first, then the dishes, food, individuals and conversation.
There is trust and fear that comes with the meal—a trust that with an
honest conversation, knives will not be raised in anger, and a fear that
customs and rituals are not universally understood. Taste is our most
intimate sense, and the table is where we experience it socially. My
studio practice pivots around these notions of the table, and how the
work could bring people back to this place of social intimacy. In the
1880s dinnerware was advertised to women just like high fashion, where
the table was the mannequin that needed dressed. I am pushing ideas of
social iteration at the table through my towers, choreographing the
progression of the meal by stacking the dishes to be unwrapped as a gift
together. By investigating historical meals, I am able to imagine the
choreography of the footmen, who gracefully moved from guest to guest,
and guest to sideboard, and then to consider the modern hostess,
who scrambles to prepare the meal for her guests. These towers replace
the footmen and the frantic host, commenting subtly on such social
implications through their utilitarian attributes. I am using food as a
way of seeing the world, the tableware to create rituals through
decorum, and the table to build camaraderie. As the maker it is my
greatest wish to see these objects in use in the world, although beyond
this notion, my greater desire is through their utility, the necessity
of the table within the home becomes indisputable.
Lindsay Scypta
Clay Art Center 2013-2014 Artist In Residence
by Carole Epp | Mar 8, 2014 | call for entry, emerging artist, job posting, monday morning eye candy, movie day, residency opportunity, show us your influences, technical tuesday
Artist Statement:
My work is currently exploring Dominant and Submissive personalities in a way that explores sexuality along with storytelling. Who is taking on a role that emits control? Perhaps not whom one would suspect- and what is happening to the forms of these creatures? They are in the process of shifting, of slipping into another identity. Is there a shift in a dynamic where the role that is expected of someone is reversed? What happens to the way they perceive themselves and the way others see them? It also explores emotions that are personal to me, yet universal in experience. Frustration, helplessness, suffocation, love.
