Artist StatementI am a sponge. I absorb everything. I make art to channel and transform my emotions. When I lost my parents as a young adult, I crossed an ocean to forget, my life boat was drawing. When I became a mother, drawing was my anchor. When cancer attacked my own body, sculpting became my buoy. The act of making is vital to me. My art pieces make up series narrating the story of segments in my life. I am a mix media artist. On paper, I make drawings, on a wall, I make paintings, on a press, I make monoprints, with clay I build sculptures. But all the pieces, whether two or three dimensional, are symbolic representations of ideas drawn from my personal iconography. Over the last three years, my focus has been on building ceramic sculptures. After a life of working only in two dimensions, I made a powerful discovery: I am a sculptor. I have found that clay is the perfect material for me. It has infinite ways to embed my physical energy and allows me to build expressive new forms inspired from my drawings. Working with clay has opened up an endless desire to build new sculptures. An expression of my experience as a woman and a mother, my subject is the female body. I am currently working on a project titled ‘Female Vaisselle’, a series of ceramic sculptures where the female figure is represented as a symbolic vessel, a hollow container with human attributes. These humanized vessels explore the body as a storage for interior life experiences. The ceramic sculptures are created in various clay bodies and range in size from 4 to 17 inches high. They are hand build and glazed, some are ornamented with drawings made with cobalt oxide. |