ABOUT

Clare Burson is an interdisciplinary artist working across ceramics, textiles, metal, found objects, and sound.  Her creative work is rooted in a search for continuity across time and is part of a much larger conversation around what is remembered, why, by whom, and through what means. 

Burson’s practice, driven by a compulsion to mend ruptures and fill emptied space, is one of creation, destruction, and repair.  With clay as her primary material, she anchors her sculptures in the archeology of the ancient past.  She begins by building and refining simple vessel forms with coils. She distorts the forms at various points during the drying process.  She drops the soft clay shape and tears it into two.  She takes a hammer to bone dry clay and breaks the vessels into shards. 

The true work begins as she responds to these shapes; she reassembles the fragments and incorporates new materials that suggest cycles of civilization and the tenuous space between past and present.  For pieces in her Kaboom! series, she uses porcelain paper clay to reassemble ceramic shards into forms that reference but are no longer true to their origins. After firing, she covers the paper clay seams with collages of brightly colored comic book pieces.  

For her woven wall pieces she imbeds some of the clay remnants within intersecting and woven lines of thread, yarn, and cord.  They become nexus points alongside found objects, keepsakes, fabric scraps, and beads.  The work emerges intuitively, with each element undergoing decontextualization before it can be re-contextualized within the bounds of a simple rectangular frame.  

The use of material juxtapositions allows her work to be soft and sharp, muted and bright, chaotic and controlled. Sculptures and weavings become physical manifestations of her efforts to close the distance between the old and the new, the trashed and the treasured, the ephemeral and the eternal.  From disparate choices and concepts, a cohesive idea emerges : distinct threads of past and present, intersecting and informing each other over and over again.