teendewen-blog

[teendewen-blog]

[teendewen-blog]

Coille Hooven

Artist Statement

Meaning evolves as I work on a piece. It comes from my inner dialogue and the physical act of working with the clay. Similar to a dream, the finished piece has layers of the literal, surreal and personal. It creates a feeling that lingers. My desire is to reflect the pleasures and struggles of being human.

Working with porcelain, one has a tempestuous partner. One must not get it too wet or it will collapse. Get it too thick and it will crack. Temperamental, it is affected by weather and its own degree of malleability or plasticity. Even in a well sealed plastic bag porcelain stiffens up over time. This clay has a willful mind of its own. It took me years to become its partner, to hear its tune.  I learned to say, “What are we ready for today?”  Porcelain is known as the most difficult of clay bodies. It shrinks 20% from wet to final glaze which complicates the drying and firing process.  But as the saying goes “No pain, no gain,” for porcelain is the also Queen of all clays. The strength and exceptional plasticity of these small flat molecules can capture gesture and movement exquisitely. I can create attenuating or loop-de-loop handles.

Porcelain is the highest fired of all clays, to 2400 degrees- white hot. It then becomes translucent where thin and exceptionally strong. As I make a piece, I flow with the rhythm of making, focus on controlling the shape as it appears until it feels finished.  Whether I am making teapots or fantastical shoes, the feel of the clay is alive and I am part of the process. What a fortunate calling it is, to be an artist, a passionate affair.

​

What a fortunate calling it is to be an artist, to participate in the creative flow. As I coax the birth of a new piece, I am so often filled with surprise and wonder at how a lump of clay has become so expressive of exactly what I didn't realize I was trying to convey.

-Coille McLaughlin Hooven 2013

Coille McLaughlin Hooven was born in New York City and grew up on the east coast.  Art was already in her genes: her father worked as an architect and her sister, a painter. Her Great Grandfather, James McLaughlin, was also an architect and designed the Cincinnati Art Museum.  In addition, her Great Aunt Mary Louise McLaughlin was instrumental in publicizing the American art pottery movement. 

Hooven discovered ceramics when she enrolled in a beginning class at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, in 1959.  Her teacher was the legendary David Shaner, then a recent graduate of Alfred University, and he was not only to become her “spiritual teacher,” he and his family would become close friends.

Hooven graduated from Illinois cum laude with a B.F.A.  She and her husband, painter Peter Hooven, joined the faculty of the Maryland Institute, College of Art, in Baltimore, MD.  

In 1970, newly divorced and with two young children to raise, Hooven left Maryland and moved to Berkeley, CA.  She saw the ceramics field on the west coast as being freer, more open to exploration. In 1973 her first one-woman show was held in San Francisco at the Imprint Gallery; half of the pieces were sold before the show opened.​

Hooven’s work is usually small-scale, delicate, often whimsical and imaginative.  She is also concerned with women’s issues and relationships.  She sees herself as a role model for younger women, as someone who has combined both family and working – as her own mother did – and done it successfully to the enrichment of everyone concerned.

Coille Hooven has shown her work in a number of exhibitions, both solo and group, and is included in such prestigious collections as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Oakland Museum of California, the Museum of Fine Arts in Salt Lake City, Utah, and the National Collection of Fine Arts of the Smithsonian Institution.

​

[teendewen-blog]

Lucia Friedericy

A childhood love for making dolls and puppets and an educational and professional background in theatre and fashion design all came together twenty years ago when I combined my interests and began a business of "dolls as art". These whimsical figures are sculpted in porcelain and paper clay on a wire armatured body. The costumes are made from vintage textiles, lace, and silks. Each doll is completely hand-made with my primary inspiration coming from literature and fantasy. The notion of art dolls as decorative objects lead to creating charactor shadowboxes and masked tiles as wall art.