Kimberly Chapman

Artist Statement - Kimberly Chapman My artwork balances the beautiful and the macabre. Childhood memories loom large, as does nostalgia – a longing for loved ones lost. What’s left behind is what fascinates me. My goal is to create something solid that calls upon past experiences and helps me remember and cope with what’s been lost. I am captivated by the color and texture of porcelain clay. Its soft, malleable, finicky nature demands nothing short of complete patience and attention. It allows me to engage my past and mine what I know. Once known as “white gold,” porcelain was prized for its durability, delicacy and exotic origin. Artists devote their lives to it and kings and emperors have long demanded it. Sculptural in nature, my objects are hand built or slip cast. The clay is kept raw like the emotions that emerge during the building process. Obsessed with the beauty of its whiteness, only a small amount of clear glaze is applied. Color seldom appears. The marks of making are left as a record of my presence. Photographic imagery from my personal archives supplements my work in the form of surface decoration. Manifestations of my memory in art form include cameras from my past, structures built from nostalgia bones, otherworldly creatures protecting and cloaking memory, figures inspired from ancestral stories and reincarnations of inhabited homes. I see my work as three-dimensional drawing in clay and use it along with nostalgia to remember my past.