Artwork
Craft
#Andréa Keys Connell
#ceramics
#sculpture
“What Comes Down Should 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 method to higher perceive how artwork provides to the human expertise, the North Carolina-based artist feels large 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 means that painters strategy paint. “I really feel like [clay] has the power to create a extra dynamic portray,” she shares. “With my items, I’m all the time chasing a picture, and after I see that picture in my head, I see it first as a portray.”
A number of years in the past, a fireplace destroyed the group artwork house Connell and her accomplice had been operating, and a number of other of her ceramic sculptures perished as effectively. Though many objects have been fully decreased to shards, some survived fully intact. Discovering enduring works inspired her household to, as she recounts, “flip towards what hadn’t been misplaced. On this means, we continued our search with not solely resolve, however a form of happiness.” Sifting via the rubble supplied a way of closure, and in its personal means, the act of looking via grief related together with her overarching perspective of treating craft itself as a type of looking for. Connell expresses:
This expertise had a profound affect on how I now strategy my making. The rationale I miss lots of the items I misplaced within the fireplace is that they marked time in a particular means, and at their greatest, they felt alive to their second. They have been, and stay, issues I need to proceed to carry. The lesson for me is: if the thing is misplaced, the language of care is clarified—and I hope this informs my work. I need to maintain the current second, and to carry the issues I’ve nevertheless I’m able to.
Connell is making 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.
“Maintain On”
“Lean”
“Shelter”
“Window”
“Stability”
“Holding”
“Hug”
“Slumber”
Element of “Maintain On”
#Andréa Keys Connell
#ceramics
#sculpture
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