Elizabeth Arzani
Duration: January 2023
Elizabeth Arzani is a short-term resident proposing to create a series of hand-built and thrown moderately sized vessels designed with holes using methods of additive and subtractive clay construction mimicking the homonyms: hole and whole. Her aim is to further develop her skills beyond her previous projects with slip casting and mold making and shift to combining hand-building techniques with wheel thrown forms. In the last two years, clay has become a predominate medium in her interdisciplinary practice, and it has proven to be a rich material for investigating the tension between rigidity and flexibility.
quick facts
How many years have you been working as a clay artist? Within the last two years, I've begun to incorporate clay into my interdisciplinary practice.
What is your main clay body that you currently use? Stoneware.
What is the primary method you use for building your work? A combination of using slip cast molds and hand building.
What is your favorite studio tool? An extruder.
Do you have any future clay wishes or dreams? To practice and experiment throwing on a wheel.
ARTIST STATEMENT
As an interdisciplinary assembler, I construct narratives from moments of curiosity, absurdity and potential humor in happenstance. My impulse to collect and my desire to recycle is a search for connection and an attempt to collaborate with the unknown. Working between painting, sculpture and printmaking practices reveals allegorical relationships embedded in materiality. Stories are told in the cracks and creases, stains and rust of physical objects, layered with my own mark making. They become sitespecific maps of a place, offering a form of communication that extend language. Focusing on the nuances within a vernacular, I question what is lost or can be transmitted through translations. Guided by a set of “what ifs,” I create a vocabulary of gestures that transcribe my findings in cyclical forms of destruction and repair. I locate my subjects in the possibilities presented in fragments of things faded, forgotten and old. They hide in plain sight: in daily lists, conversations, the paths I repeat, the windows I look through and the doors I open (and close). Much like a puzzle, traces of information imbue how I pair different processes and techniques to assorted ephemera. The results exist as questions, testing what can function in unexpected and precarious ways.
BIOGRAPHY
BORN: Charlotte, NC | USA
Elizabeth Arzani is an interdisciplinary artist and educator living and working in Portland, Oregon. As a collector of sorts, her work is rooted in storytelling, offering a form of communication that extends language. Arzani has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions both nationally and internationally at The Center for Contemporary Art & Culture in Portland, OR; CoCA (Center for Contemporary Art), Seattle, WA; Levine Museum of the New South, Charlotte, NC; City Hall Rotunda Gallery, Rock Hill, SC; and during Luxembourg Art Week in the Salon 2019 du Cercle Artistique de Luxembourg. She has participated in the Kulturschapp Artist Residency, transforming a former freight depot in Walferdange, Luxembourg into a site-specific installation and has collaborated on public art installations with Shunpike’s Storefronts Project at Amazon Headquarters. Arzani recently earned her MFA in Visual Studies from Pacific Northwest College of Art and holds a BFA in Painting and Art Education from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.