This entry was posted on Monday, June 22nd, 2009 at 11:41 am and is filed under Artists, Ceramic Sculpture, Chatterley, Mark, Contemporary Sculpture, Figurative Sculpture, Sculpture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
On May 25th, 2009, Brigitte Micmacker conducted an interview with Mark Chatterley. Chatterley will open a new solo exhibition at Sculpturesite Gallery on June 25th.
Brigitte Micmacker: Mark, you have been making life-size figurative sculptures in clay for close to twenty years now. What was the impetus for moving in this direction?
Mark Chatterley: I didn’t realize it has been so long, it seems like I am just starting on working on the figure. I started out my career by making vessels, but they soon got boring, everything was round or distorted round. I came to think of the pots as human forms. The names you use to describe a vessel are human: lip, foot, belly, neck, shoulder. So I decided to go right to the figure and take the functional quality out of the work. The ancient Greeks postulated that Man is the measure of all things. So I set out to understand the human condition. Proportions, relationships, survival.
BM: You built your own walk-in kiln, which you fill with many works and fire every three months. Did you adapt your work method to this huge kiln, or did you build the kiln to match your natural work rhythms?
MC: My kiln is 700 cubic feet, 8 feet high by 9 feet wide by 10 feet long. I like that I can walk right into the kiln to load the work. The reason I built such a big kiln was that I wanted to work big but did not want to fire the works in parts. I found the seams to be visually distracting. I thought I would never build anything bigger then this kiln. The second time I fired it I had to dig the floor out to get the work in. I fire a body of work around every 3 months. I build non stop 6-7 days a week to fill the kiln. Then I bisque fire, next the work comes out and I glaze for 2 weeks, and re-fire.
(interview will continue tomorrow)
