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Gravity of Place
Chris Stoddard
Jessie Wilber Gallery
Closes August 31
**Join us for an artist talk this Friday, August 14 at 6:30pm during Art Walk!
About the work
The pieces in this exhibition incorporate clays foraged from Montana and sites where my ancestors and I have lived— ground carried forward, made into form. Although this began as a practice for exploring my personal relationship to land and lineage, the work speaks to experiences shared across generations of people who have moved, been displaced, chosen to stay, or been left behind.
The questions that practice raises are the questions of this show. What do we carry when we leave a place? What do we owe the places that made us? Can belonging be porous, or do communities depend on borders and shared history to be close knit? How does movement shape our collective understanding of obligation, belonging, and community?
The figures are not portraits but postures of staying, leaving, or returning. Ceramic bricks made from the foraged clays propose that home is something constructed out of the materials of place, built slowly and collectively while navigating forces that both pull and push.
About the artist
Chris Stoddard is a contemporary ceramic sculptor whose figurative pieces explore the layered legacies of family, industry, and belonging. Many of her pieces incorporate hand collected “wild” clay and other materials from personally meaningful places to reinforce the ties between the earth and the human body, the tension between human industry and the natural world, and between the past and the current moment. She has exhibited throughout the Western United States and lives in Bozeman, MT.
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