Rebecca Harvey received her MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan and my BFA from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Numerous awards include a Greater Columbus Arts Council Award, several Ohio Arts Council Individual Artist Awards and International residencies in Dresden, Germany, Uppsala, Sweden , Jingdezhen, China and Olafsfjord, Iceland. Articles featuring her work have appeared in Studio Potter and American Craft.
My work revolves around questions of the material and is based in the residue, both physical and intangible, of objects. My project-based sculptural work reflects the implications of place on process and materials as well as the sea of image and meaning that forms the ways that objects carry, create, and compound meaning.
I inhabit a landscape of desire, my work roots me in one spot, my family in another, and between the two my heart nevertheless pulls, towards big water and unknown possibilities. I travel back and forth and around, ticking away the thousands of miles. The time in between becomes spaces to stack the passing bits; sun slanting, roads curving, engines buzzing. These catch me off guard, lodge in my body like stones, surfacing in the spring.
My forms play with the line between recognition and understanding. Rearranged and abstracted, they exist in an arena between the idea of an object and the object itself. Color floats above surface, used to unify groups, to set up the push/pull of positive and negative space. I play with reflection and absorption, using one to measure the other, lining and misaligning shape and surface, confusing surface and form. Sometimes the arrangement almost pulls together, smudges, the sounds the shapes make full and strange in your mouth, just beyond the grasp of understanding. Stripes and lines measure, become a page, a ramp, a hill, the stripes like light on the highway, thin repetitions marking time.