Dylan Beck, Ceramics Department Head and MFA mentor, at Fondation Bernardaud, Limoges, FR

Sans les mains!

June 1 to Sept. 30, 2018

The exhibition Sans les mains! comes at an exciting time when ceramics is entering a new chapter in its 25,000-year history. Digital technology is adding new tools to the artist’s toolbox and enabling the making of artworks previously impossible to produce. Sans les mains! showcases a selection of ceramics made by thirteen of the field’s leading international ceramic artists, in a ground-breaking exhibition organised by the Fondation d’entreprise Bernardaud in Limoges.

About

My artwork explores the interaction of human activities with the natural environment and the idea that manmade landscapes express a society’s material and political priorities. Within this domain, my interests range from concepts of land and natural resource use to the psychological effects of living in the “non-places” of a hypermodern world. Our contemporary condition has given us an overwhelming trust in progress and created places that have no relation to the natural environment in which they reside.

In my studio practice, there is no hierarchy of material or method. I believe in a holistic approach to art making--an approach that balances aesthetic judgment, craftsmanship, concept, and material. Within my work there is often a direct material-to-concept relationship. Accepting that all materials carry cultural and historical significance, I choose materials that feed my conceptual agenda.

Through personal experience of landscape and aerial and satellite imagery, I select ubiquitous forms and images. I then use that information to construct sculptural arrangements, drawings, digital images, animations, etc., employing the same spatial relationships that are inherent in our built environment. There is disunion between my aesthetic attraction to images of built landscapes and my feelings toward the issues they embody. Therefore, I situate my work between skepticism and veneration.