painting of a woman

Craft Center Gallery

Bold Strokes

Andrew Thompson / Nickole Barron

The show features sculpture and paintings by two Craft Center studio managers. Each brings a boldness to the gallery. Nickole defines painted subject matter with a vibrant pallet and dramatic lighting. Andrew brings deconstructive energy through ceramic sculptures. Each artist compliments the other. And Andrew has pots for sale. 

Andrew Thompson statement: : My objective when making ceramic sculpture is to deconstruct my understanding of how I was taught to make it. I was taught, as most people are, to build evenly and hollow, to make a single piece and glaze it and have it finished when it comes out of the kiln. I’ve tried to make work that interrogates the process by demanding what can be accomplished by not following this traditional process. I work in parts, approaching each part much like a studio potter would approach a single pot in a long day of throwing. Each part is separate, individual, though in the kiln they bind and become part of a single entity. Then they are broken again, bound together again, part after part. I’m interested in extending the workable lifetime of ceramic pieces, using morsels and shards of my own fired work in creating something new, creating an index of history of my own work that compiles to something that feels immense. The vessel often appears in my work as the base through which these pieces are bound. I intend to question the vessel's place in contemporary ceramic art as a traditionally considered craft object. I always want my work to be ceramics about ceramics. I want each piece to be self-referential, about the process it took to get there, to be a display of the accumulation of processes and firings each individual piece went through to arrive in the work. Each piece is a catalog of my own history of making it, a display of the narrative of process. 

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