AUREN Gallaspy’s ceramic work invests quotidian life with an intentionally unsettling inner purpose. By roughing up and distorting commonplace paint-your-own ceramic figurines, she transforms them into uncomfortable, even ugly, iterations meant to disguise objects we may in our domestic pasts have been told were too delicate to touch. Gallaspy intends to evoke the idea of danger and fragility inherent in even the most benign and familiar ceramic objects. “Like wolves disguised as poodles,” she says. The College of Fine Arts is pleased to showcase Gallaspy, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art & Art History. She has received recognition from the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts as an Emerging Artist, and in 2012, received a prestigious Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors grant recognizing her unique ceramic creations. Gallaspy says she sees the awards essentially as an encouragement to enter her studio with a certain purpose: keep creating. She received her BFA in ceramics at the University of Georgia in Athens, and her MFA from Alfred University in Alfred, New York. Her studio practice includes sculptural and functional ceramics as well as painting and drawing. She has exhibited widely in galleries, museums and at conferences nationally and internationally since 2004. From 2009 to 2012, Gallaspy served as co-director and owner of Trace Gallery in Athens, Georgia. Gallaspy says her first affinity was painting, but she was drawn to clay. She started out clumsy, she says, yet intrigued with the material’s challenges
and possibilities. As a three-year-old, she drew weird creatures interacting in their weird ways. “I pretty much do the same thing today,” she says, only with clay. “I love the material,” she says. “I love what it offers.” One of the sculptures submitted to the Joan Mitchell Foundation, Tar Baby, is a 15-inch-tall hand-built piece that looks as if it were melting. In a reversal of the classic and alienating children’s story, Gallaspy found joy in getting so stuck in the material she couldn’t tell where she ended and the material began, an intrinsic connection rather than a trap. Using coil, pinching, and slab-building techniques, Gallaspy embeds the objects in clay along with bits and shards of other material. She uses wet slip to hold it all together, then applies wet, dry, fired and unfired pieces to make abstract and representational images on the surface of a piece. This unconventional, even subversive technique, “is exactly what we’re told not to do,” she says. In her artist’s statement, she states that her work “is about that imbalance: the vulnerability of living things and the sometimes violent, sometimes pleasurable, almost always complex consequences that occur when bodies and objects in the world come into contact with one another.” Decoration in the work “acts as a bridge between language and form, supporting paths between the brain and the body,” she says, “but also as a way to entwine cultural meaning with personal stories.”
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PATTY HENETZ 9 STUDIO / 2014