Celebrating those who share their creative hands, heart, and head to bring us a bit more joy.

MARK KOLINSKI 

Artist Statement

For Mark, clay exerts both fascination and challenge. He is captured by clay’s accessibility, sensuousness, and its technical and conceptual possibilities. Throughout the making process, clay requires the artist to attend closely, a kind of deep reading, to its fragile temperament. As a ceramicist, Mark works with a particular sensitivity to the visual interplay between surface, decoration, and three-dimensional form. 

 While some of Mark’s pieces work as vases, his work is generally non-functional and directed towards formal sculptural concerns: line, form, texture, color, shifting geometric planes, negative space, illusion, balance, and pattern, and juxtaposition. 

The addition of figurative and decorative elements appeared as a result of years of travel and living abroad where the richness of Persian carpet design, the suppressed schematic imagery of ancient Egyptian art, Asian textile and fretwork patterns, textile designs created in the Wien Werkstatte during the Secessionist period, and object obscura collected and displayed in glass case vitrines by Austria’s 19th century aristocracy, found their way into his work. These decorative elements are co-opted, distilled, and applied to ambiguous narratives and landscapes. 

Sketching is a fundamental first step to Mark’s process. Dance, yoga, or athletics, movements that require extreme physicality are translated into figurative forms. Negative space is emphasized by decorative patterns. These spaces extend and expand the form while adding dynamic tension. These decorative details suggest draped fabric wrapped like a sarong around the figure and may be mirrored on the form’s face. The figures, often contorted yet graceful, are somewhat flattened and frontal. In silhouette, they  reference a kind of calligraphy. The surfaces are suppressed and dark. The darkness focuses attention to the form but also acts like black ink applied on paper with a sumi brush. 

Mark hopes to engage the viewer by slowly revealing layered juxtapositions: grace/contortion, positive/negative, minimal/ornamental, organic/geometric, volume/flatness, eros/logos. 

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