In the exhibition Telling Gestures, the artist uses ceramic sculptures to explore the silent communication behind body language. The artist builds figures full of life and expression, using body language to communicate emotion, and inspire the viewer to invent their own narrative. The surface texture of the figures is created by pulling and scraping the clay and is inspired by Lucian Freud’s textural application of paint. The large figures are disassembled and reconstructed during the firing process using a technique similar to that of contemporary sculptors Andrea Keys Connel and Beth Cavener Stichter. Using terra-cotta clay, the artist has created figures of various scales. Some of which are cropped in ways that direct the view to a specific feature of the body. The variety of whole and sectioned figures within the exhibition invites the viewer to compare and contrast different kinds of body language and to have a more observant eye about this kind of communication.
