Red Lodge Clay Center, Short-Term Resident (MJ Do Good) 2019
Casey Whittier is an artist based in Kansas City, MO. She earned her MFA from the University of Colorado at Boulder and her BFA from Kansas City Art Institute. Recent exhibitions include: CU Boulder Art Museum, Jane Hartsook Gallery at Greenwich House Pottery, Daum Museum of Contemporary Art, Index Gallery, and Craft Alliance. Whittier has been a resident artist at Red Lodge Clay Center, the University of Florida, and ArtFarm, among others. She teaches ceramics and social practice at the Kansas City Art Institute, is the president of ArtAxis, and works with The Land Institute on their ongoing research into sustainable food and oilseed production.
My work is often born from one of the following experiences: an indescribable feeling of excitement; a nagging contradiction; a need to share something that I cannot yet explain; an obsession; a question or series of questions; a desire to respond to or reflect on a thought, feeling, or event; the recognition of something poignant or absurd; a deep pain; the experience of misunderstanding. The systems of construction I use are adapted and adopted from historical craft disciplines. Although the unit or material may change from one work to another, these systems highlight the interdependence of each unit upon the whole. I use very simple tools and work in low-tech ways to keep evidence of the hand and the human embedded in the work.
The studio is an ecosystem of my making: I re-purpose as much as possible (my cast glass and clay are reclaimed materials or mixed in small batches and reused until no longer viable). I design to reduce my energy and material consumption and to consider the cyclical nature of materials and of making. I make. I unmake or, at times, I feel unmade. Living is a dynamic, daily process. Life is tenuous and thrilling, delicate and precarious, simple and complicated, wry and serious. I ask my work to embody these seemingly disparate realities.
Each sculpture and installation is a way to advocate for an intentional relationship with the worlds of material and metaphor. An exploration of touch and intuitive making is deeply embedded in my practice. Clay serves as palimpsest; I seek to exploit its inherent variations in surface and texture, its ability to mimic, to be thick, thin, ephemeral or permanent. The physical recordings that come through rolling, tearing, squishing, dipping, pushing, pinching, casting, and scratching become representations of touch, of thought, of time spent.
Rena Detrixhe and Casey Whittier Collaborative Project for Clay as Place: The Transient Object
Statement
This body of work evolved out of ongoing collaborative work between artists Rena Detrixhe and Casey Whittier.
Stemming from a deep regard for the land and the desire to create work that responds to place, their shared work invites close attention and reflection and communicates the intention to care for the landscape. Materials are sourced directly from the artists home places, mindful of the lifecycle of those materials, their inherent qualities, and the possibilities they offer for both form and metaphor.
Using this exhibition invitation (specifically: work related to a sense of place, and who explore ideas about their geographic environment as an intentional response to the transient nature of clay) as a starting point, Rena and Casey designed a structure for collaboration with the intention of expanding their relationships to the material world and their local environments through creative exchange.
The site of exchange begins in each artist’s studio and backyard and the space in between, including a public walking path where the artists meet regularly. By passing ideas, sketches, writing, clay, and other materials back and forth, transitory nature is built into the creative process, informing the work and building meaning and points of connection.