Ceramics Portfolio Reflection

During my undergraduate studies, I began referencing the visual language of pop culture to bring attention to political and social issues. By recreating familiar kitsch forms in my sculptures like the American artist Jeff Koons, I found two things occur. The first was that recognizable visual forms offered viewers an easily accessible entrance into the work. The second was that I could take advantage of the viewer’s comfortability to sneakily pose confrontational ideas. As a result, themes of mass production and capitalism became inescapable in my artwork. I became aware that like the unsuspecting concepts in my artwork, the material I use to create my sculptures also catches the viewer off guard. That is because the complex American cultural issues that my work addresses, is captured in the simple elemental material of clay. I believe that when I recreate familiar products and imagery from industry in clay, I am re-rooting them in the tradition of the handmade. I admire how handmade artworks from art history carry messages from the times they were created in. It’s important to me that my work also carried this tradition of capturing reflections of our current time as well.

By the time I began my graduate studies, I realized some of my artworks were being viewed or interpreted as too literal. In an effort to step back from this, I started to consider and incorporate ideas of the natural world or nature into my sculptures. I shifted my focus to how there is a love and fear of nature. While I continued to make sculptures of kitsch objects, I portrayed nature as neutered, controlled and safe. Deliberately left open-ended, my sculptures invited the viewer to evaluate their own personal values in which they impose on animals and why. I believe this makes my artwork both more approachable and relatable to viewers without the direct lecture my previous artwork sometimes offered.