ARTWORK
I’ve made clay bird bowls for many years. They guard and embrace the spaces within, nesting, like loving parents. They are pinched, wheel-thrown and slab-constructed. Most are stoneware fired in oxidation. In two-dimensional work I often incorporate crows as watchful companions who remind me of my brother, Pieter.
One time a tall ceramic bird I made 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 that the bird’s absence reflected her presence, a theme that recurs for me. 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. The flat dress forms provide space for decoration and abstract expression.
The form of the dress speaks about the reducible reality I felt in my youth and now in my aging, referencing qualities that are internal and personal but also qualities that societies apply and expect.
Lidded vessel
Calling attention to the sense of invisibility we can feel and which can be applied to us, while maintaining joy in decoration and release in expression. The moth dress is 72” high covered with individual relief prints and burned at the edges.
Origami dresses made of translucent papers, slightly sculptural invite illumination. References to their forms in repetitious relief prints finds strength in numbers, voices asking to be heard and believed.
Some from life and some imagined. Plein air is where I find beautiful color relationships. Abstraction is my access to sense of place, whether real, remembered, or within a particular condition of my temperament.
Cat with Crow is a Solarplate intaglio print, 5” x 7” derived from photographs and drawings.
The other prints in the gallery are etchings, linocuts, lithographs and monoprints including, Half After Five O’Clock, All the Time, Landscape with Crows, Crow with Bible, Beech Haven, Rusty.
Collage reflects connections between places and times that may not be aligned in real experience. Crows pay close attention and their caw wakes me into attention such as the attention I paid when watching crows and calling to them with my brother, Pieter.
A sampling of other objects I have made, mainly ceramic.
