Casey Whittier
Land
E scape
laying around for years but just didn’t know what to do with them. I bumble around a lot when I go to make work. I joke that I spend 70% of my time finding materials and making things that just sit around until I break them and throw them away… but this is my process. Nothing is sacred and I have to fail a lot to find what I think is success…and my studio is always messy. I don’t clean anything up until a piece is done or until it is so close that I start to think of the things around me as in my way. It is the opposite of cooking in the kitchen —the time frame is very, very loose, there is no recipe and nothing gets cleaned up. I don’t focus a lot on technical aspects until I have to. I like processes that are long and arduous and almost difficult enough that I start to complain. I like making lots of the same type of thing and I love manual labor when it comes to work. I like hauling stuff around my studio and playing with power tools and trying to make something that seems just a little too fragile or a little too unpredictable.
a lot of wildflowers and I was always picking them to give my mom and my aunt. I remember thinking that this was such a nice thing to do…except that as a child I really uprooted more than I picked. My first year at CU Boulder, there was a patch of black-eyed Susans outside the building. I tried to pick one and ended up with the whole plant…so I dipped it in porcelain and threw it in the kiln.
Now let's focus on your artworks: I would like to start with your works Enviralment and I know not where I am / I am here, a very interesting work that our readers have already admired in the starting pages of this article: would you tell us something about the genesis of this project? What was your initial inspiration?
Soon I had a bunch of ceramic flowers and no idea how I was going to use them. I decided eventually that I didn’t need the whole plant. Daisies/Black-eyed Susans/Mums all grow on the rhizome, which has always fascinated me. I started building from the corner of my studio and eventually added a faux ceiling and an extra wall… and then I started making I know Winter not where I am/I#196 am here.
Enviralment came from a series of earlier works involving flowers… I have always had a love for flowers and being outside. Around my house were 92