Portrait by Donna Granata ©2023
Focus on the Masters Archive, Ventura, CA

In a world of virtual realities and changing perceptions of what is real, I am celebrating the materiality of things. My work has a sense of history and reverence for the natural world, macro and microscopic. Clay, an ancient material, inexhaustibly expresses a sense of timelessness, endurance and Universal narrative.

I enlist the dynamic qualities of clay, creating a poetic metaphoric dialogue, feeling kinship with ancient object makers. I coat natural and manufactured materials that act as armatures for the clay.  These materials are the residue and topography of human existence. I coat these materials with liquid clay. The firing process is petrification, and creates a contemporary fossil.

Surveying the petrified fragments, I begin to assemble and construct these into topographic landscapes that are poised somewhere between growth and decay, recognition and abstraction, beauty and viscera.  The visual and tactile qualities allow entry into these microscopic and macroscopic worlds that often feel somewhat familiar.

These accumulations and layers are encoded with the gravity, poignancy, and depth of human experience. I have been mining my family’s rich histories, the Japanese American Internment and the Holocaust. Both sides experienced traumatic childhoods, displacement, disconnection and persecution. I seek to share these residues and topographies of memory and spaces, preserving and memorializing. Fragility is strength.