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Read about what the artists have to say about their show.

NELL CHANDLER: For years and years I used a lot of etch­ing in my work. A few years ago I lost the abil­i­ty to etch the way I used to. The title of our show, Fig­ure and Ground, inspired me to go back through some box­es of old etched plates. In the pile of metal I found a lot of lit­tle etched fig­ures I then pulled out and dust­ed off. I sawed the lit­tle fig­ures out and sol­dered them to some ster­ling ear­rings and embell­ished them with dif­fer­ent lit­tle shapes and tex­tures in met­al. They rep­re­sent the fig­ure half.It was sug­gest­ed that two of the three artist in our show were “fig­ure” and our pot­ter rep­re­sent­ed the “ground”. I can relate to both fig­ure and ground as met­al too comes from the ground. I have been explor­ing dif­fer­ent tech­niques in enam­el­ing for the past few years and have con­tin­ued to do so for this show. Enam­els are much relat­ed to the earth also and the more I explore the dif­fer­ent tech­niques and col­ors through enam­el­ing the big­ger that world gets.I havealways enjoyed the way we can put a title ona fea­tured artist show and it will influ­ence the bud­ding of a brand new direc­tion. I have enjoyed work­ing with fig­ures again but in a brand new way. 

STACY CRABILL: In the visual arts, the figure-ground relationship is explained as the way we perceive objects in a work of art to be the object of focus (the figure) or the background (ground).This series of paintings continues to explore the theme of candy while also focusing on the relationship between figure and ground. I set the parameter that the ground had to be created by repeating the figure in a variety of ways— perhaps by way of a silhouette, an outline, or  text related to the figure. I find that I am most creative when I have fewer tools and establish limitations. This series of work gave me room to play, think, and grow.

EVELYN WARD: My work for this show is the result of what’s been evolv­ing in my stu­dio over the win­ter. As with every­thing in my work, it’s been a slow evo­lu­tion –refin­ing forms, devel­op­ing a few new slip col­ors –but always work­ing with­inthe same frame­work. In rela­tion to the title of our show: Fig­ure & Ground, I’ve been play­ing with the use of neg­a­tive space, some­times flip­ping the col­ors used on two pots and then see­ing how that effects the over­all pieces, espe­cial­ly in rela­tion to eachoth­er. It’s been an inter­est­ing and infor­ma­tive exer­cise. I hope you enjoy the new work that has sur­faced these last cou­ple of months!

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