The Clay Studio : Shop

Material language coupled with a genuine curiosity in a matter’s capacity to change, I look for intersections and parallels in my personal life to tell stories that never happened. Over the past five years, I’ve used the seemingly timeless relationship between Earth and Moon, perspectives found in contemporary novels (Truman Capote, Italo Calvino, Daniel Mendhlson), as momentum in my own fictitious musings of “what if’s” or “what will never be”. I often use newspaper pulp as the sculpture base for my objects because it offers an ephemeral quality embedded with shared, collective stories of our world and a parallel to what it means to be alive- vulnerable, impermanent, ubiquitous. During the pandemic, I painted small dead branches to look like magic wands from an oak tree that tragically fell in our backyard. The rudimentary, banal task of a painted stick was psychologically transformational because it was instantly other- a different ideology resting in the present. Hope became the overarching antidote to the global tragedy – perhaps the only meditative action possible. In my most recent work, I cast an 11-foot trunk of that same tree in newspaper pulp and painted it to look like a gigantic, magic wand – weighing about 3 lbs. The performative potential, to embody what it might feel to experience an object, parallels the human ability to dream of a better/different future. Simultaneously, I became more fixated on the permanence of ideas once they leave the body. Like words, one cannot shape their reception. I created my recent ceramic sculptures without touching them, using rubber gloves as a boundary between self and object. I’ve yet to touch these objects with my bare hands to understand exactly what attachment is possible to ideas and if they are actually separated in the absence of a tactile relationship. Ceramic material is intrinsic to this idea, as it enunciates a kind of intention and specificity that cannot be undone. Ceramics is forever. Attached to the oil-painted, ceramic forms are photographs taken from my phone and printed on aluminum, demonstrating distant touch. This action and self-inflicted transformation are alarming and relieving, a kind of desire and fear enveloped together - similar to love.

< Shop More Artists < Main Shop

Chase Folsom

Did you Know?

Can We Help?

Chase Folsom

Did you Know?

Can We Help?

Sign up for our newsletter.