Laura Kukkee

Laura Kukkee
Artist Statement

     My work in ceramics is an expression of a current and personal visual language created by a synthesis of the formal traditions of ceramics and the decorative arts. I gather and rethink the rules, toss out some, reduce and simplify some, amplify and exaggerate others. Like many contemporary ceramic artists, my sources are diverse. Major areas of influence for me are intensely decorated or ornamented historical pots and sculpture, such as Jomon Pottery, Minoan and Mycenaean palace ware, Indian architectural relief sculpture, English Medieval Slipware, D’Ormolu Porcelains and pre-Columbian figurative sculpture. My studio practice and making process is clearly grounded in potting, but also to drawing and collage in the way I compose my pieces and handle the material. The work is vessel-oriented; I focus on the charged spaces occupied by containers and objects of use. Part of the power of a vessel is that it presents to us an expectation; the baggage involved tells us we must use these objects; they must function, or alternatively, the vessel must present the image of use and functionality. The spaces, above, beside and between vessels are spaces which are charged with anticipation. This is the space in which I work. I’ve become increasingly interested in the space around my pots. Currently, the direction of my work involves the vessel becoming distilled and reduced down to its most basic, simplified form. On pots that are intensely decorated, the vessel is the frame for the drawing, pattern or painting. Decoration is so often about layers and densities of mark-making, and responding to or exaggerating the form of the pot, and historically, to emphasize its rarity or value. In my work, the vessel is still the field; but the relationship between vessel and decoration has changed. I surround or encrust the nearly neutral vessel with a three-dimensional expression of a drawing, pattern or painting. The mark-making moves out into space, and away from the pot which may have been its original source. The goal is that the work remixes and reinterprets the formal language of ceramics and the conventions of pattern and decoration through form, exaggeration, abstraction and the rhythm of repetition. Decorative motifs and patterns sprout out, lifting pattern and images off of the vessels and into the charged, expectant space. Handles change into drawings, drawings change into handles, forms repeat and multiply, pushing up and pushing out. The drawings loop out and around the vessel, floating up, spilling out, uncontained.