BTS | A Few Questions with the artist of Vessels
Beth Elliott reduces the vessel and its surface design to simple, modest, representational forms, the surfaces of which outline internal stories and landscapes. Elliott’s educational foundation in biochemistry and landscape architecture heavily influences her visions and forms in clay and sculpture, although her art is intentionally directed away from the precision that both science and architecture require. The freedom to create with abandon and explore with unfettered curiosity is essential to her artwork. Learning and studying materials and incorporating their properties and nuances into her work is an ongoing part of Beth's artistic practice. She finds textural significance in her art while striving to create interpretable but abstract forms.
Teresa Roche is a mixed media artist working in acrylic, watercolor, and collage. In building layers of paint and then scratching and sanding back into the surface, Roche's mixed media works are excavations of sorts- an unearthing of the past, which is then transformed into a new, abstracted story. The creative process and manipulation of materials fuels her work. Experimentation and combining of unlikely materials is an ongoing part of her creative practice. Her paintings often reflect a period of time or a memory, but the abstract process allows for paint and other making tools to come together in unexpected ways.
Liz Rundorff Smith paints bold, bright and iconic abstractions in oil and encaustic paint. Her vibrant color palette is reminiscent of the decor and design trends of decades past that have become kitschy artifacts. Her work elevates the mundane, mimicking the way we bring significance to loss with keepsakes and memorials. She wants to create work that evokes a sense of nostalgia and exposes the sentimentality in memory, using shape to intimate objects that are no longer identifiable but retain familiarity and reference urns, shrines, and places of veneration. Embellishments like fringe and shiny gold finishes play into kitsch, recalling party decorations, parade floats and prize ribbons and elevating the ordinary to something to be celebrated.
The word vessel means different things depending on context. A hollow container for transporting or holding something, a boat, a channel supporting life, a person, a message . . . the meanings are so vast it’s as though the word vessel describes life itself. The vessel is often defined by its shape but, more importantly, by its function and by the presumption that it contains something. The artists included in the Vessels exhibition find commonality in visual form, even as they approach meaning differently, by reinterpreting the concept of a container beyond its functional purpose. The vessel form—whether a ceramic pot or a sculptural abstraction—becomes a metaphor for holding or containing ideas, memories, and emotions. In preparation for the exhibition the artists shared processes, color palettes, concepts, and sketches to pull from each other while creating distinctly individual bodies of work. By sharing the elements that define the work the artists were able to collaborate, tying the work together while allowing them to create independently.
Q: What were some of your inspirations for the body of work included in Vessels?
BETH: For the body of work for VESSELS I literally thought about traditional vessels even though a vessel can be so many things besides pottery.
I wanted to investigate and build my iterations of antique vases, classic shapes, and amphora vases. And on another spectrum, I thought a lot about the atmosphere when formulating the glazes. The atmosphere that contains us, a stretch for vessel definition but I think it still works.
Choosing forms and features that recall the sense of traditional pots and merging those with the asymmetry and organic imperfect quality that I like to highlight in my work, I was inspired to create a series for this show as my ode or tribute to traditional vessels.
Q: Can you describe how you worked with the other artists in the exhibition to collaborate?
LIZ: I was excited to collaborate with Beth and Teresa but knew that it would be difficult, because of time constraints and distance, to work together in person. We found a way to collaborate by sharing our processes and using everything from sketches to color and materials to connect the work.
For example, Beth shared sketches of the shapes she was working on for the exhibition. Next, I made the shapes from her sketches into the paper template that I used as a stencil in my work. Once I was done using the paper template I passed them on to Teresa to use in her collage work.
Q: How does the body of work you created for Vessels differ from your other work?
TERESA: This body of work has been somewhat of a departure from past works, I waited until I saw some of Liz and Beth’s first pieces to take my lead from them. They are both brilliant artists who I respect and admire and I love to dig deep into their processes and their line work.
I love collaborations for this reason – I am so inspired by the brilliant work that they both create. My interpretation of "vessels" turned toward my love of the Carolina coast and memories of islands, wetlands, wild and untamed coastline -- this work is very conceptual.
Q: Did you find that working with the other artists in the exhibition provided inspiration and sparked ideas or was it challenging to your creative process?
BETH: I definitely liked working knowing who the other artists in the exhibition would be because it did spark ideas in terms of forms and textures. All three of us seem very drawn to textures and layering in our art. I found it challenging in a good way. A new context and theme to create towards.
Liz always inspires me in how she studies every day objects and themes and reduces them to clean simple shapes that she highlights and studies in her nuanced layers, textures and amazing color combinations. Her approach to shape and context is something I thought about as I created the vessels for the show.
Teresa inspires me in so many ways as well. Like myself, she is a designer and an artist and I am inspired by the amazing range she has for colors, layering and textures in her designs, her textiles and her art. What I kept in mind as I created for the show, was the soft but sure gestures that I love in her paintings. There is a quietness in her paintings that resonated with me as I worked on the glazes and general feeling I wanted to portray through my art for VESSELS.
Q: Do you have a favorite piece or a piece that you feel is most successful in the exhibition?
TERESA: I do have a favorite piece that began with an image cut out on the floor of Liz's studio. Wax and pigment - then heat and scraping, then quickly discarded. This image became somewhat of a message to myself about patience and slowing down -- not to be so dismissive of work that doesn't come together as my mind originally saw it, but to let work sit and settle into something totally different with a completely opposite meaning.
Q: Why is the vessel important symbolically in your work and in this exhibition in particular?
LIZ: I love the ambiguity of vessel-like shapes and find that meaning can change with the slightest change to the form. For instance, just adding handles to a vessel takes the object from a container that is used to hold something to an object that can be held. Handles on both sides of the vessel push the shape from functional to celebratory . . . I think of trophies and chalices when the object has handles on both sides. In this exhibition the vessel means something different to each of us. For me the vessels are repositories for personal history. I use the vessels symbolically to grapple with intimate experiences and interpersonal relationships.
Explore work from Vessels
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