Artwork
Craft
#Andréa Keys Connell
#ceramics
#sculpture
“What Comes Down Must Go Up.” All photos © Andréa Keys Connell, shared with permission
Andréa Keys Connell has an immeasurably tender outlook on craft. Viewing object-making as a strategy to higher perceive how artwork provides to the human expertise, the North Carolina-based artist feels great pleasure in sculpting clay.
Coated with expressive brushstrokes in exuberant hues, Connell’s figures embrace each other and exist in shut proximity, melding into single entities. Her sculptural compositions are impressed by the sheer delight she experiences whereas creating and the sentimental tales on which she bases her works.
Fascinated by the complexity of the fabric, the artist explains that when it comes to course of, she has all the time approached clay in the identical method that painters strategy paint. “I feel like [clay] has the ability to create a more dynamic painting,” she shares. “With my pieces, I’m always chasing an image, and when I see that image in my head, I see it first as a painting.”
Just a few years in the past, a hearth destroyed the neighborhood artwork area Connell and her accomplice had been operating, and several other of her ceramic sculptures perished as nicely. Though many objects had been utterly decreased to shards, some survived utterly intact. Discovering enduring works inspired her household to, as she recounts, “turn toward what hadn’t been lost. In this way, we continued our search with not only resolve, but a sort of happiness.” Sifting via the rubble supplied a way of closure, and in its personal method, the act of looking out via grief linked together with her overarching perspective of treating craft itself as a type of searching for. Connell expresses:
This expertise had a profound affect on how I now strategy my making. The rationale I miss most of the items I misplaced within the hearth is that they marked time in a particular method, and at their greatest, they felt alive to their second. They had been, and stay, issues I wish to proceed to carry. The lesson for me is: if the item is misplaced, the language of care is clarified—and I hope this informs my work. I wish to maintain the current second, and to carry the issues I’ve nonetheless I’m able to.
Connell is getting ready for an upcoming reveals at Blue Spiral 1 in Asheville and Jane Hartsook Gallery in New York Metropolis later this yr. Discover extra work on the artist’s web site, and observe her on Instagram for updates.
“Hold On”
“Lean”
“Shelter”
“Window”
“Balance”
“Holding”
“Hug”
“Slumber”
Element of “Hold On”
#Andréa Keys Connell
#ceramics
#sculpture
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