Barbara Hager Ceramics
Barbara Hager Ceramics

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Ceramic Art Pottery

The Classical and the Grotesque

by SMCC
Associated with rationalism, the classical provides the normalizing aspects of western culture and high culture. The classical body is closed, self-contained, monumental, symmetrical, masculine, and sleek. The classical model of progress corrects and erases mistakes.  Opposing the classical is the grotesque, which leaves room for chance, for error.  Historically the “grotto-esque” refers to the excavation in fifteenth-century Rome of Nero’s…
Ceramic Art Sculpture

Lifesize Matrons

by SMCC
The boundary is a tiny space where two hierarchies meet. Hierarchies are reordered as binaries. Categories don’t line up with realities. The classic meets the grotesque. Illusion meets reality in the boundary.  Information is necessary to change the worldview. In the boundary we can puzzle how information is taught, artists can change the worldview by dissecting and turning truths. Nothing…
Ceramic Art Sculpture

Body Risks

by SMCC
The body risks began in earnest when she was eighteen, innocently; she was unconscious that she was risking anything. Sheila began with the high dive, carefully executed in diving class, back dives, jackknives, flips, and cartwheels from the board twenty-five feet above the pool. These dives were as thrilling as they were terrifying. Dives from high rocks into quarries, fifteen-foot…
Ceramic Art Sculpture

Pythagorean Contraries

by SMCC
Sheila dances on the proscenium, that space between the curtain and the orchestra where the stage meets the pit. You believe in one-to-one correspondence. Two things cannot exist in the same realm equally. It must be one or the other, black or white. Sheila believes life provides an amalgamation of gray values. Life is a collection of perfection and errors…
Ceramic Art Sculpture

Mary Russo: The Female Grotesque

by barbara
They were omnipresent in her childhood. The schoolteachers. The five aunts. Her grandfather’s sisters stood, posed in front of the family home. Their silver hair, washed and dressed in braids, wound around their heads. They were wide-shouldered women, their bosoms secured to fashionable belts. The skirts of their dresses alluded to hips as spacious as their shoulders. They balanced on…
Ceramic Art Sculpture

The Diver

by barbara
Coffee steamed, hot and aromatic from the potter’s cup. It was stoneware, black and white glaze, with the drawing of a woman circling the cup. Sheila held it to her face as she gazed out the kitchen window. The handsome snow woman gazed back. Savoring the contrast of steam and frost, she absently traced the drawing on the cup with…
Ceramic Art Sculpture

The Queen

by barbara
For their garden chessboard, Christopher and John Thomas asked me to make a queen similar in stature and passion to Eva Per`on. The Queen began with photos of Eva and evolved into the only African royal matriarchal tribal lineage; the Queen of the Limpopo Province in South Africa, Queen Makobo Modjadji, who reigned Limpopo when this sculpture was made. To amalgamate imagery…
Artist Inspiration

Daily Rituals

by barbara
In the winter my daily studio rituals include staying warm, staying active and conserving water. When I enter the studio in the morning, I turn on the furnace, tune in the music and commence dancing. As cabin fever plays a growing role in our lives, the joy of having a space where I can play loud music, leap, twirl, boogie…
Artist Inspiration

New Work Birthed During the Pandemic

by barbara
These new pots depicting animals and plants found in the St. Louis River Watershed and Lake Superior were thrown on the wheel during the early weeks of the pandemic when counting the weeks in isolation was novel and we were washing every surface and doorknob hourly with bleach and water. I was fortunate to spend many of those months sharing…

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