Caged Figures
I began working with the figure in my pottery as undergraduate after a chance encounter with a social group in a hotel bar in Columbus, Ohio. Every two weeks, a BBW Club (Big Beautiful Women) would get together and go out dancing. I realized that I was the outsider in the equation. There was an beauty in the way they moved, not only because it was unfamiliar to me socially, but also because of the volume and mass in motion. I joined them in dancing, and I continued to make pots about the subject for the next ten years. By 2012 I realized that the pots weren’t getting better.
My first figurative sculptures were meant to inform my pots, but instead they led to new questions about ideal beauty. In one attempt to challenge the question about conventional beautiful, I imposed a structure around the figure as a restriction on that perception. That wasn’t the story I wanted to tell, so I began to impose structures onto other figures. After modeling from images of infamous political leaders in pieces like “Pundit” and “The Senator”, I focused on the image of a toddler. The implicit vulnerability of a young person evokes empathy and raises cautious questions.
The Future Generations Series was an extension of my graduate work, including images of cityscapes that were small enough to be moved by two people. I wanted the work to feel larger than human on a scale that was manageable, so I used figurative elements to alter the proportion of the viewer to the object. The newest pieces in that series morphed to include the voluminous figures
