Claudia Fitch

Artist Profile

My current studio work is centered on ceramic traditions, exploring the ceramic form as both a figural and functional object, and to make wry commentary on the metaphorical cliche “female as vessel”. These ceramic figures are studies of my own female form, cropped and spliced onto functional, architectural elements, and staged to test models of femininity brutal and humorous. A 2015 residency in Berlin shifted and deepened this focus. I was immersed in the collections of Meissen porcelain, of ancient terracotta figurines, and portraits of figures in draped Roman dress, full scale, carved in stone. But concurrently, I discovered a contemporary publication of snapshots gleaned from abandoned mid-century ephemera from the US and Germany. The subjects in the snapshots echoed the social realities and horrors of both countries, familiar and incomprehensibly tragic. Berlin led me to recognize realties of my parents’ generation, but also of my own generation, of personal and public histories continuously repeating. I now collect images of human gesture, ubiquitous and larger than life, personal and public. On my studio wall, they demand space, a second look, a response. I re-enact some of the gestures; fleshed out as a clay model, an object embodied, grounded, balanced. I seek its gesture to stand true against the cacophony of studio life, to change perception of the space it occupies.