QUICK FACTS

How many years have you been working as a clay artist? I have been working as a clay artist for about five years.

What is your main clay body that you currently use? I will use any stoneware clay, I am not picky.

What is the primary method you use for building your work? I use coil-building as my main construction method.

What is your favorite studio tool? My favorite and most used studio tool is a wooden spoon my father gave me.

Do you have any future clay wishes or dreams? I hope my work keeps leading me to strange new places and continues to generate more questions than answers. 

ARTIST STATEMENT

I noticed a running theme through the furniture on the curb, the “too-orange” faux pine wood furniture. These pieces of craft reductive furniture were over manufactured from the late 90s and far too late into the 2000s. The collecting and storing of this furniture (while having no space to put it) inspired decisions on how to present the work. Through arranging these discarded domestic objects with my ceramic objects, I am prompted with various questions: What is directing trends? Why are values leaning away from valuable objects? What is the allure of fast furniture culture? What is the current state of consumer consciousness? And what does storage charge objects with? In my current body of work, I construct these arrangements in a format that presses precarity and false compact space. I am careful not to alter the curb-found objects and allow the ceramic to be influenced by the found.

The role of ceramics in these stacks is to facilitate these discarded things into a composition it would otherwise never have achieved. I see these arrangements allowing the discarded furniture to advocate. Through my practice and the way I treat these objects has led to a humanizing aspect to these things. When it comes to personifying things I see it most when I find them initially as it becomes more than just what the object can do for me. It is apparent in the arranging aspect, allowing them to tell me where they fit best in, on, or around each other. Again, in the end when analyzing the object seeing what a ceramic intervention could do in service to it and how the form I create could be comfortable for it, is when they are more than just a piece from the curb. What I believe leads to this personification is the pity of driving past a piece of half decent furniture on the slide of the road. It feels inhumane to leave it to the landfill which personifies most of anything that ends up there. The horrid conditions make it seem that even things that are not living could not live there. In thinking this way, I added lighting to the ceramic vessels as to “leave the lights on” for the objects while no-one is around. Existing in a darkness for an unknown amount of time until it is next visited, used, experienced shares a similar cruelty to the landfill. I find that most of my ceramic decisions are made by sympathizing with these objects as they themselves are in a period of transition, leaving their current home for who knows where.

BIOGRAPHY

BORN: Columbus, OH | USA

Alex Lewis received his MFA in ceramics from Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, in 2023. In 2021, Lewis received his BFA in Ceramics with a minor in Art History from Otterbein University, Westerville, OH. He has exhibited in the US and in Canada.