Heather Bradley
biography |
artists listing
SELECTED EXHIBITIONS
2008 Featured Artist, del Mano Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
2007 Deeply Decorative: Ceramics with a Feminine Edge, Watts Towers Art Center,
Los Angeles, CA
2006 Palette Contemporary Craft, Albuquerque, NM
Distant Connection, White Raven Studios, Las Cruces, NM
Ink and Clay 32, Kellogg Gallery, CSU Pomona, Pomona, CA
2005 Continuum, University Art Gallery, New Mexico State University
2004 Frenetic Connection, JME Studios, Las Cruces, NM
ARTIST’S STATEMENT
Painting on clay is the ideal media for me because it connects me to the earth, to centuries of women’s traditions, and it allows me to endlessly explore surface and form. My work honors my own femininity and unique vision. It is a celebration of the privilege and freedom I have to make art.
The forms are nearly all wheel-thrown. The meditative, physical nature of throwing clay on a potter’s wheel is essential to my work. The shapes in my work echo forms seen in sacred architecture from around the world. Buddhist Stupas, Gothic Cathedrals, Islamic Mosques, etc… all have the same sense of reaching, stretching up, striving for the divine, the heavenly that interests me.
Pattern and decoration is a language that has always felt natural for me. I am inspired by the millions of artists around the world who have used decoration as a way of beautifying their daily lives, and also by the feminist artists of the 1970’s. These artists honored decoration as a traditional feminine art form that should be celebrated as “high art,” never to be seen as “merely decorative.”
The free-flowing patterns I carve and paint are distinctly my own. The designs are organic and spontaneous, subconsciously influenced by the millions of patterns on textiles, architecture, and objects I’ve seen throughout my life.
2008 Featured Artist, del Mano Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
2007 Deeply Decorative: Ceramics with a Feminine Edge, Watts Towers Art Center,
Los Angeles, CA
2006 Palette Contemporary Craft, Albuquerque, NM
Distant Connection, White Raven Studios, Las Cruces, NM
Ink and Clay 32, Kellogg Gallery, CSU Pomona, Pomona, CA
2005 Continuum, University Art Gallery, New Mexico State University
2004 Frenetic Connection, JME Studios, Las Cruces, NM
ARTIST’S STATEMENT
Painting on clay is the ideal media for me because it connects me to the earth, to centuries of women’s traditions, and it allows me to endlessly explore surface and form. My work honors my own femininity and unique vision. It is a celebration of the privilege and freedom I have to make art.
The forms are nearly all wheel-thrown. The meditative, physical nature of throwing clay on a potter’s wheel is essential to my work. The shapes in my work echo forms seen in sacred architecture from around the world. Buddhist Stupas, Gothic Cathedrals, Islamic Mosques, etc… all have the same sense of reaching, stretching up, striving for the divine, the heavenly that interests me.
Pattern and decoration is a language that has always felt natural for me. I am inspired by the millions of artists around the world who have used decoration as a way of beautifying their daily lives, and also by the feminist artists of the 1970’s. These artists honored decoration as a traditional feminine art form that should be celebrated as “high art,” never to be seen as “merely decorative.”
The free-flowing patterns I carve and paint are distinctly my own. The designs are organic and spontaneous, subconsciously influenced by the millions of patterns on textiles, architecture, and objects I’ve seen throughout my life.