Started the following week making these forms in clay.
Soon realized my senior year would be my busiest year yet, never in 3yrs at SAIC had I been so confidently wholly myself. I was functioning at a higher and fuller level then I had since coming to Chicago, as I looked inward at this new wind of change in me, I thought back on my journey here. My first year at school marked my mother's passing. Grief changed me left me empty. Transforming me in ways I'm still coming to understand. This most recent summer left me healed in ways I didn't know were possible, and so ready to give of my self. I had more artistic inspiration then time, more love then places to give it, and was growing and becoming in ways that are worthy of hours of journaling- hours I didn't have time for, growth words were insufficient for.
I kept making these clay forms, abstract and so organic. I still don't have a name for them, They aren't gourds or bird nests or teardrops but they are all this and more. I decided early on that they would compose my BFA Show piece. I kept making them, no grasp or hint of the concept that drove them forward and pulled me onward, no clue what to call them, except my babies- because the affection I felt for them was something similar to that I feel towards the children parents let me tend to.
Towards the end of the semester I critiqued them outside of school, with artists and non-artists from around Chicago. A friend and mentor of mine who knows me well was there, and that night he said of these forms, "Courtney, I feel like they are a self portrait in a way. In that they mark your journey of the last few years, particularly these past few months of growth, receiving, pouring out."
My concept was born that night. Here in midst of every moment being seemingly occupied with people, places, and projects, with no time in the day to sit and ponder and record, I had found space to play- and unknowingly expressed what I could barely place a finger on intellectually.
This piece, is from it's beginning about play- about the place i make my best work from. To date it is the strongest piece of work i have celebrating my artistic process and what I know of it at this point. When I start taking my art making to seriously, to intellectually, placing too much weight on it, i overwork it, it becomes heavy-handed and exhausted. when I release myself from my controlling and contrived tendencies- when I just let myself play, and surrender to that freedom, I make beautiful things. These forms were not thrown well, in fact they relied heavily on my bad technical skills. Bad old habits of throwing off-centered and too fast.
When I sat down to make a commissioned set of coffee cups- I threw better cups then I had ever thrown. Somewhere in playing around in the mud I had sharpened my throwing skills.
I was growing as an artist, and this piece celebrates that.
