cameron ford

Duration: september-december 2022

Cameron Ford is one of the 2022 resident artists this fall. His style of ceramics is unique to our program and strengthens the diversity of artists we’ve supported over the years. Cameron creates hand-made ceramic tile installations and aims to develop his artistic concepts, explore new influences and sharpen his technical skills.

His project goal is to construct a small public building or kiosk decorated with ceramic tile advertisements and propaganda reflecting those he grew up with in Kiev, Ukraine. Ukraine’s socialist heritage includes a strong sense of irony, a suspicious view of official proclamations, and distrust of both public and private institutions. Cameron is pessimistic about the power of propaganda to convince through argumentation, but rather, like a frog in a pot, it acclimates its viewer to a certain preferred perspective. Advertising is the most common form of propaganda in the west, and through this project, he will interrogate the mechanisms of propaganda and to try his hand at producing some of his own.

quick facts

How many years have you been working as a clay artist? I started working with clay in the spring of 2017, so just over five years now.

What is your main clay body that you currently use? I mainly use earthenware or cone 6 stoneware for tiles. Lower temperature firings help mitigate the tendency of tiles to curl up or warp. I have used porcelain in some slip-casting.

What is the primary method you use for building your work? I mainly produce press-molded tiles which I decorate with underglaze. I also slipcast some of my work.

What is your favorite studio tool? The surform is indispensable in shaping plaster molds and tidying up the sides of tiles. It works quickly to evenly shave down high spots.

Do you have any future clay wishes or dreams? I hope to work in large-scale ceramic murals for public spaces. I also look forward to pursuing a Masters in Fine Art in the future.

ARTIST STATEMENT

My work presents a contemporary representation of Soviet art and history to an American audience. My hand-made tile murals depict posters and advertising in a Socialist-realist style, distorted and obscured through computer pixelization. I am fascinated by propaganda and mass communication, especially in rapidly reproducible media. In creating ceramic objects, I am giving this ephemera a more permanent existence. Like the memories and messages of paper posters, these tile posters persist.

I was born in West Germany in 1990, to US military parents and later moved to Ukraine as my parents embarked on Southern Baptist missionary work. In Ukraine, I evangelized, learned Ukrainian and Russian, and traveled in Eastern Europe. When I returned to the United States for college, I deconstructed my Conservative, Evangelical upbringing and encountered some deeper philosophical problems with capitalism and theism.

I use a combination of digital image manipulation and mathematics software to plan my work. Soviet-era concrete fence panels and other architectural geometry translate well to pixelization in a tile texture or a cross-stitch embroidery. My murals are a permanent manifestation of a digital display. I am interested in the ways digital media affects how events are remembered. Pixelization, compression artefacts, and other distortions change memory. Digital art manipulates memory through how it presents experience.

Tile murals are common in the former Soviet Union, especially in large public spaces and transportation infrastructure. Their ubiquity is due to their durability and a long tradition in the Russian Empire of mosaic art in a religious context. By creating 3-dimensional tiles, I engage the viewer in a tactile experience, bringing public art into personal contact. Physical touch produces a different kind of memory, rooted in the body, unlike images which can be manipulated and exist only in the mind.

With the recent Russian invasion of Ukraine highlighting again for a new generation the old conflict between East and West, my work is particularly relevant for understanding some of the context of the shared cultural and ideological history of Russia and Ukraine. I interrogate the specifics of Ukrainian socialist history and interpret the cultural baggage of Soviet rule for its inheritors. This work combines digital and physical; past and present; East and West. My cross-cultural background, diverse interests, checkered past with religion, and politics shape and distort my perception and memory. Born in a country that no longer exists and raised in a state haunted by nearly a century of Communism, I appropriate images from a lost past and interpret them for the increasingly uncertain future.

BIOGRAPHY

BORN: Augsburg | West Germany

Cameron Ford is a ceramic artist whose tile and slip-cast work draws from his childhood spent in Ukraine. He uses Eastern European and socialist imagery to explore personal history. Cameron's ceramic practice started in community studios in Virginia and he completed Post-Baccalaureate studies in ceramics at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville in 2022. Cameron's work has appeared in craft fairs in Southern Illinois, and he was awarded Judge's Choice in the Edwardsville Art Fair in 2021. Currently his work is available at Jacoby Arts Center in Alton, Illinois.