The Artmaking ProcessBig ideas--broad, important human issues--are characterized by complexity, ambiguity, contradiction, and multiplicity. However stated, big ideas do not completely explain an idea, but represent a host of concepts that form the idea. For example, the term conflict may represent a number of concepts such as power, personal and social values, justice and injustice, and winners and losers.
Because they provide artmaking with significance, big ideas are important to the work of professional artists--and to you. Making art is about creating personal meaning rather than simply crafting a product. Big ideas are what expand art beyond technical skills, formal choices, and media manipulation to your personal issues and conceptual concerns. Big ideas create deeper levels of thinking and more rewarding art.
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The Artmaking process
My pots contain subtle narratives that reference the historic changes brought about when one culture’s actions influence the course in which another culture proceeds. Craft, and specifically pottery, is a vehicle common throughout history that often depicts these trends. I employ historic patterns to direct the user to this theme for, similar to language, pattern contains a lineage that reaches backward through families, traditions, villages, kingdoms, wars, famine, and prosperity.
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Bridging technology and form is an essential element in my work; however, it is important that neither overwhelm the final outcome. Using silkscreen and embossment transfer I add patterns borrowed from history to emphasize volume and add a sense of timelessness to each piece.
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Though complex in their creation, each pot still illustrates the intrinsic beauty found in the everyday ceramic object. By blending form, pattern, and surface, my goal is to create an object that simultaneously elicits a visceral and intellectual response, followed by a contemplation of my work as a whole.
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Text paraphrased/altered from: Walker, Sydney R. Teaching Meaning in Artmaking. 2001. Davis Publications, Inc