My Artist Statement

Well, here it is, at long last, my artist statement that I had to write for my review. Let me know what you all think.

Sorry it's kind of long, but I have a lot to say. Oh and the second gas firing went well, we unloaded it today and it all looks good!

Artist Statement:
In the art work I have been producing this semester I have attempted to deal with the boundary between the physical and the spiritual. As a Christian, this means asking two questions. Where does God come to me? and Where do I meet God? These two questions, I believe are radically different. Best explained by the writer Anne Lamott, my understanding of God and his grace comes often in the mundane, small things of life; the created ‘stuff’ that so often goes unnoticed. This is where I feel like I meet God, in the everyday small things where I can begin to understand who this creator God is. It is in this understanding that my functional ceramics are situated. The mundane of a mug, I believe, can show the goodness of a creative God, working through me, just as much as a figurative sculpture.
On the other hand, I see God coming to me in a different way; he comes to me in my heart and in my mind. I know that God loves me, and I know that I am created by him; this is the knowledge of my heart. So often though, my mind can not understand that knowledge, and in this way God speaks to me where I am most vulnerable, in my fallen human self where my understanding is flawed and my mind limited by what I can understand about an unlimited God. This problem of understanding the creator God, I believe is deeply rooted in the idea of humans being image bearers of God and how despite the goodness of creation our understanding of God had been disrupted, and what significance that has on our interactions and daily lives. It is in this half of my interaction with God that I find other individuals explanations most useful, to verbalize what I cannot.
Kasimir Malevich, in his essay titled “Suprematism” discusses the losing of the physical and the spiritual that comes from this nothingness, where there are no symbols or artistic conventions. While I agree with him that the idea of the spiritual is often lost in our modern world when we become so busy with the clutter of everyday life, there is a profound difference in my beliefs. Where Malevich wants to rid himself of the physical to find this spiritual, I believe that because we are made in the image of God, there is good to be found in the physical. In addition, because of the goodness of the creation, there is something worthwhile about the physical. This is one of the reasons that I am exploring the figurative form. While there are issues with the fallen body, the fact that we are made in the image of God, I believe reveals that there is an inherent goodness to our physicality.
An artist who I feel captures this sense of the goodness of the physical in his work, albeit in a very different way, is Felix Gonzales Torres. While Minimalist in their appearance, Torres’ works represent the physical and the emotional in ways never envisioned by the minimalist originators. His sculptural works to tend to be critiques of society’s treatment of certain bodies, specifically those individuals affected by AIDS and the resulting struggles and eventual death, but there is still an inherent hope that exists in his work. Mundane objects are transformed into objects that represent love, loss, grief and so many human emotions. Maybe more poignant is the lack of the human figure in Torres’s work, but nevertheless, his work shows what it is to be human and what it is to deal with the body. This is expressed for me in my abstracted sculptural works which tend to be composite works like Torres’ and made up of small, simple components. And while conceptually dealing with the body, these works of mine do not deal with naturalistic human physicality.