How to Feel Full:

Artist Statement

“How to Feel Full: an exploration of intimate drawing and journaling on clay” is a body of work that incorporates my journaling and drawing practice into my dominant medium of clay. I build all of my work by hand primarily using the technique of pinching. Pinching is one of the oldest ways to form vessels and I love the intimate imprints my hands leave in the piece and the imperfect nature of the shapes.

My journaling and drawing practice are an integral part of how I process the world around me. The vessels in this show are in shapes of vases and bowls that I paint and write on colour on the matt surface of raw clay. They are a way for me to validate and literally solidify the thoughts and practice of journaling by translating them on to three-dimensional form.  I aim to use the juxtaposition of the fragile yet long lasting nature of the material to compare to my making my usually private practice both permanent and fragile, quiet and public.

I am also translating my drawing lines into forms of sculptural armature that support and accompany these vessels. By building everything by hand, I’m creating imperfect, tactile surfaces to draw and write on and creating an object that invites the viewer to move around it to fully understand and read it. I am exploring questions that surround my reality and narrative. Questions and thoughts about environmental and social anxiety and a search for meaning, purpose and what it means to be human in our current context. I am interested in revisiting places, landscapes and experiences that I am connected to by translating them into drawing. I’m interested in the ways I can interpret these places through emotional response, to create a more “realistic” or true representation of my memory and experience. Imposing excerpts from my journal, both visual and written, are a way to connect these experiences to these objects, which in themselves are intimate reflections of the marks from my hands.

These pieces are quiet reflections of these themes and are accompanied by the armatures, or “cages” that add an element of three-dimensional drawing and playfulness. Colour and contrast are a really important aspect of this process and I constantly question the relationships they have to each other. I love to see how I can play with colour first on the vessel, and then with different objects to create new relationships between colour, form and line that I haven’t thought of before.

Also included are my functional wares such as mugs, bowls and cups. In my functional work I create pieces that are playful, whimsical and hopeful, by using colour, imperfect forms and recognizable imagery.