Heather Kaplan

Website:

www.hgkaplan.com
https://www.instagram.com/ hgkaplan1/

Biography: 

Heather is an artist, educator, and researcher living in the southwest. 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 or 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 landscape can convey connection and objects create relations while still implying an autonomousness and interactivity with the viewer. Her academic work involves the study of studio making and young children and believes that this interest bleeds into her making practice.  She creates works that involve ceramic techniques derived from sculpture- including life modeling and mold making to create fantastical tableaus that address the oddness and transcendental qualities of the desert.  She uses a variety of techniques including hand building, casting using both slip and press molds, and throwing.  She enjoys layering glazes of differing temperatures and textures to achieve complex comb.

Artist Statement: 

This work is about uncanny landscapes and the play around creating and forming new familiarly unfamiliar spaces.  The work does this through the language of toys, figurines, and collectibles in their form, content, and size. Because of their size, what they are made of, their interchangeability, and their figurative qualities my works deal with the imaginative. Like figurines and toys my work begs to be arranged, rearranged, and played with. As a function of this narrative structure 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.

Specifically, this work is an exploration of play and childlike aesthetics –the aesthetics of carnival, festival, imagination, and play. I also assume that what I am drawn to play with, to rearrange, to look at more closely, and am generally fascinated with will catch the fascination of others. I work with and foster this interest and through this experimentation with forms, color, and texture, I am questioning aesthetics of interaction, play, and adult relations to children and childhood. At the same time these practices create strange playgrounds or landscapes or places to play that are familiar in their childlike language and unfamiliar or uncanny in their form or combination of form.  This uncanny element has ramped up in more recent work as a response to the forms, textures, and space of the desert environment I live in.