Statement

Art and Religion are two things that have been a constant in my life. I have been making art since I was a little girl, I also attended church from that same time till I was in my  late teens. 

 

 I grew up attending a Southern Baptist church that lacked any sort of decoration or ornament. When I was ten, I saw Disney’s Hunchback of Notre Dame and immediately became fascinated with Cathedrals and gothic architecture; It was completely  different from the church environment I grew up in.  I saw and still see cathedrals and churches as the portal to a higher being, as they capture and encapsulate heaven and earth in one. The building material touching the earth, coming from the earth while also climbing so high, touching and capturing part of the heavens. 

 

 In my current work, I am looking and the cathedral and the patterns made in the planning of the cathedral. I use the spiral as a decorative element, it is also a shape/motif I draw a lot in my notebooks. I roll thin slabs of porcelain into spirals and pinch them to create heart and eye shapes. These shapes are then used to help form patterns in the body of the cathedral .

 

By making cathedrals and mounds I am not only exploring the body of the church as viewed from above like god would, but also my own spirituality and the religion that spawned it. 

 

I use clay because I like the tactile aspect of it. I like the way it feels, the way I can mold it and prod it in to the forms I want. I like how clay can be permanent, yet in the work I make, the porcelain is fragile because of the thin thickness of the clay.  The clay also came from the earth and I am using it to recreate places that are deemed sacred in a profane space. 

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