Eliot Joanna Angell

Statement

The political scientist Glenn Tinder said “argument is the stepping out and affirming of one’s own irreducible reality,” but I am more comfortable with fluidity than solidity. I seek to represent my own reducible reality, my transience. My attention is drawn to the permeable membrane between physicality and transcendence, simultaneous layers of my experience: clothes and an invisible core. I sense that when I work creatively I open access to a world of threads in our collective dream life or at least to a depth of personal symbols that have meaning to me beyond reason, argument, or words.

Since 1990 I have made ceramic birds. As planters and bowls, they nurture the spaces they hold. One time a tall bird looked a little bare, so I made a clay dress for her. When the dress didn’t fit, I hung it on the wall and saw the bird’s absence reflected her presence, Indirect narrative grew from a deep river of stories both told and untold: I portrayed famous women and nursery rhymes: - Joan of Arc, Cleopatra, Marilyn, Scheherazade, Four and Twenty Blackbirds.  Words and symbols reflect the way we dress our naked souls with opinions and ideas.

My abstract works are translations of moving through layers of experience, grounded in natural and built worlds.

I would like this work to reflect threads of my experience in my skin and in this political world, with a prayer that we and our children will rise in simple flight above repression, abuse and discrimination to be the creative, graceful and beautiful people we were born to be. My creative practice brings me home to this ideal.