MFA Thesis Exhibit
Jake Brodsky
Ceramic Art
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Artist Statement
I make pots. I enjoy asking both nuanced questions of form as well as big-picture questions of what pots do in our world, but it is the latter which has guided my research this year. Objects can acquire their own kind of agency through being enmeshed in the social fabric of our lives. Vessels, as containers, delineate an interior and exterior space and connect the two. They are metaphors for our bodies, which bridge our interior psychological space from the exterior world that we inhabit.
My work is rooted in ideas of life, death, and transformation. Ceramics is a time-based medium, and I have been exploring the concept of time in different formats in my work: repetition as a marker of time, time in the context of funerary vessels, the time of visible transformation and melting that happens in the kiln, and time expressed through the drying of wet clay. Things happen linearly in the transformation of clay to ceramic, but from my perspective as a maker, this linear progression, repeated many times, becomes cyclical. There is a rhythm to working in repetition that creates an infinite amount of potential expression.
My work is rooted in ideas of life, death, and transformation. Ceramics is a time-based medium, and I have been exploring the concept of time in different formats in my work: repetition as a marker of time, time in the context of funerary vessels, the time of visible transformation and melting that happens in the kiln, and time expressed through the drying of wet clay. Things happen linearly in the transformation of clay to ceramic, but from my perspective as a maker, this linear progression, repeated many times, becomes cyclical. There is a rhythm to working in repetition that creates an infinite amount of potential expression.