Debbie Kupinsky – Red Lodge Clay Center

Debbie KupinskyAppleton, Wisconsin


Red Lodge Clay Center – Short-Term Resident (AIA) 2019

Debbie Kupinsky received her BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute and her MFA from Louisiana State University. Her creative work often explores the way we mediate experience through images and the intersection between the human and natural world. She has been a resident artist at the Archie Bray Foundation for the Ceramic Arts in 2009 and 2012, The Appalachian Center for Crafts in Smithville, TN and the Arts in Industry program at Kohler in Sheboygan, WI in 2014. Her work is in the permanent collection of the Long Beach Museum of Art and The Archie Bray Foundation among others. She shows her work nationally, internationally and regionally and is currently an Assistant Professor in sculpture at St Norbert College in De Pere, WI. She maintains a studio in Appleton, WI.

I am interested in how art can reframe memory and everyday experience to transform how viewers interpret the world. Much of my ordinary life exists within the simple events of the day and the objects, forms and experiences that come with them. Ceramic materials enable me to record these impressions to create direct marks and forms that not only represent recurring events, but also act as markers for time.  I want the work to reflect a simplicity and directness, where viewers must look and discover unseen and obscured parts within the works. Craftsmanship is something that is less important to me than the direct and plastic quality of the material itself.

Abstraction is a way to go deeper into experience and allow for open ended meaning. My work reflects some of the natural forms at the heart of my work, but also takes these visual ideas as starting points for riffs and repetitions. I want to leave space for the viewer and allow them to construct meaning as they encounter spaces and forms.