Clea carlsen - about the artist

BIOGRAPHY

Clea Carlsen was born and raised in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and earned a BA in studio arts from Bard College in 1999, with an emphasis in painting and printmaking.  She lived in Los Angeles for the 10 years following, working as a scenic artist for the Pasadena Playhouse State Theatre of California.  During time off, she pursued her own creative projects which eventuated her interest in clay as a possible medium for her work and led her to enroll in a ceramics handbuilding class.  Her affinity for the material was immediately apparent and has proven to supply a continuous creative drive which had previously seemed unattainable.  At the end of 2009, she returned to Santa Fe to develop her first body of ceramic work.

Carlsen's highly-detailed figurative ceramic sculpture, informed by a sort of personal mythology, is characterized by an inclination toward classicism.  The artwork is handbuilt using stoneware clay, often with post-firing additions of wood and other materials.  It is painstakingly crafted by trial and error, to the detriment of speed, in service of an unconscious, interior narrative which may otherwise be lost by premeditated design.  Conceptually, the work negotiates the complexities of the human condition and individual experiences of being, especially concerning the particularities of a female perspective.  Her work has been exhibited in Santa Fe, New York City, Chicago, and Miami.

There is a recurring motif in myth, art and literature in which one must descend into the underworld in order to obtain something of great importance, be it perhaps knowledge or something lost. My work describes the experience of that murky place, or what brings me there, traveling in the clutches of the human condition.

Weighed down as I am with human faults, not least those typically ascribed to “the second sex”, I view the work as an attempt to accept the self and the trials of the journey. It leads me down from what is, through what has been, into what may ever be: a reminder of will, perseverance and the promise of coming out on the other side. I do aspire to some equivalent archetypal response in my audience, but in a hectic world characterized by constant pressing—ever forward, ever faster—I hope for this work to elicit some pause, if nothing else, some moments of consideration and contemplation.

STATEMENT