Visions In Clay 2024
Heather Kaplan
Heather Kaplan is an artist, educator, and researcher living in the southwest. Heather received a BFA in ceramics and a BS and MS in Art Education from the Pennsylvania State University and she earned her doctorate in Art Education from the Ohio State University. Employed as an Assistant Professor of Art Education at the University of Texas El Paso, her art making is an integral part of her life and career. Not originally from the southwest border region, she is inspired by the textures of the desert and the complexity and contradictions of the border region. Since relocating in 2016 she has been using her ceramics to explore how landscapes can convey connection and objects create relations while still implying an autonomous and interactivity with the viewer. Her academic writing and research involve the study of studio making and young children and she believes that this interest bleeds into her making practice.
My work is very much interested in the ontological and epistemological position of relationality in that it explores relationships between objects and discourse through play and assemblage. I create a visual language or encyclopedia of ceramic objects that I later curate, collect, or play with. The work is about exploring the vernacular of parts and the relationships that they create together, and setting in motion an implied narrative that the viewer is very much empowered to consider and enter into. These objects in their juxtaposition of everydayness, abstraction, and figuration, resist and invite narrative while rejecting ossification as a single author-driven story.
This work is about uncanny landscapes and the play around creating and forming new familiarly unfamiliar spaces. Through the language of toys, figurines, and collectibles in their form, content, and size my works deal with the imaginative. My work begs to be arranged, rearranged, and played with. As a function of this, implied narratives emerge through the combination and recombination of objects. Texture and form drive my decision making as well as a desire to keep the content and narrative fluid. Depending upon who curates (interacts with, arranges, etc.) the collection of objects different stories unfold.
Spring Marmalade, 2024
Low fired ceramic; electric firing
7x8x10 inch
$1000