ELIOT JOANNA ANGELL
QUICK FACTSYears As An Artist
Life. (Mom was an artist and mentor.) Main Clay Body Transparent Cone 6 Porcelain, Highwater Clays Loafer’s Glory Primary Clay Building Methods Slab, wheel, coil, pinch…. Favorite Studio Tool Ribbon cutting tool, my stamps and sprigs Clay Wishes or Dreams To see an arts and crafts museum established on the Southside of Savannah |
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ARTIST STATEMENT
I seek to represent my own reducible reality, my transience.
The political scientist Glenn Tinder said “argument is the stepping out and affirming of one’s own irreducible reality,” but I am more comfortable with fluidity than solidity. My attention is drawn to the permeable membrane between conditional reality and transcendence, the simultaneous layers of this human experience, our clothes and our invisible core. I sense that when I work creatively I open access to a world of threads in our collective dream life or at least to the depth of personal symbols that have meaning to me beyond reason, argument, or words.
Since 1990 I have made ceramic birds. As planters and bowls, the birds nurture the space within them. When one tall bird looked a little bare, I made a clay dress for her. When the dress didn’t quite fit, I hung it on the wall and soon observed that the bird’s absence reflected her presence, and that the relatively flat surface was like a shaped canvas where I could enjoy decorative play with texture and color. Indirect narrative grew from my consciousness of a deep river of women’s stories both told and untold. I portrayed famous women and nursery rhymes: - Joan of Arc, Cleopatra, Marilyn, Four and Twenty Blackbirds. At times I use words and symbols to reflect the way we often decorate our naked souls with opinions and ideas.
Recent dresses incline toward flight and have come off the wall into the round as freestanding and hanging sculptures. The invisible figure behind them is passing through as a temporal, spiritual inhabitant of her physicality. “Spirits in the material world” as the Police would say.
I would like to fly. Dreams of flight taking off from my grandmother’s front porch step and gliding up to weave in and out of the ethereal treetops – this sensation informs my work. In recent monoprints, collographs, and etchings I utilize the dress in flight in narrative fashion. When I work abstractly, I begin with a kinesthetic narration and translate the condition of my presence into a collage of spatial sensation, texture and color until I recognize the place and feel at home.
I would like to reflect a common thread of my feminine experience, women’s experience in our skins and in this political world, with a prayer that we and our daughters and sons can rise in simple flight above repression, discrimination and abuse to be the creative, powerful, and beautiful children we were born to be. The creative process brings me home to this ideal.
The political scientist Glenn Tinder said “argument is the stepping out and affirming of one’s own irreducible reality,” but I am more comfortable with fluidity than solidity. My attention is drawn to the permeable membrane between conditional reality and transcendence, the simultaneous layers of this human experience, our clothes and our invisible core. I sense that when I work creatively I open access to a world of threads in our collective dream life or at least to the depth of personal symbols that have meaning to me beyond reason, argument, or words.
Since 1990 I have made ceramic birds. As planters and bowls, the birds nurture the space within them. When one tall bird looked a little bare, I made a clay dress for her. When the dress didn’t quite fit, I hung it on the wall and soon observed that the bird’s absence reflected her presence, and that the relatively flat surface was like a shaped canvas where I could enjoy decorative play with texture and color. Indirect narrative grew from my consciousness of a deep river of women’s stories both told and untold. I portrayed famous women and nursery rhymes: - Joan of Arc, Cleopatra, Marilyn, Four and Twenty Blackbirds. At times I use words and symbols to reflect the way we often decorate our naked souls with opinions and ideas.
Recent dresses incline toward flight and have come off the wall into the round as freestanding and hanging sculptures. The invisible figure behind them is passing through as a temporal, spiritual inhabitant of her physicality. “Spirits in the material world” as the Police would say.
I would like to fly. Dreams of flight taking off from my grandmother’s front porch step and gliding up to weave in and out of the ethereal treetops – this sensation informs my work. In recent monoprints, collographs, and etchings I utilize the dress in flight in narrative fashion. When I work abstractly, I begin with a kinesthetic narration and translate the condition of my presence into a collage of spatial sensation, texture and color until I recognize the place and feel at home.
I would like to reflect a common thread of my feminine experience, women’s experience in our skins and in this political world, with a prayer that we and our daughters and sons can rise in simple flight above repression, discrimination and abuse to be the creative, powerful, and beautiful children we were born to be. The creative process brings me home to this ideal.
ARTIST BIO
Eliot Joanna Angell is an artist working in ceramics, printmaking and painting. Her first teacher in all of these media was her mother, Jean Eliot Surber Diehl. They spent long hours in their Savannah, Georgia studio and in museums and galleries in Washington D.C., Chicago, and New York. Joanna’s father, Bruno Bak, was also an artist and teacher.
Joanna earned a Bachelor’s degree in English from Drew University and an MFA in Printmaking from the University of Georgia where she studied lithography with Charles Morgan and ceramics with Ron Meyers. She continues to study at the Penland School of Crafts through scholarships and workshops. Joanna is an Instructor of Ceramics, Printmaking, and Foundations at The University of South Carolina Beaufort. She also teaches Printmaking and Ceramics at Armstrong State University in Savannah.
Her work engages the form of the dress both in two-dimensional media and ceramic sculpture. Dresses appear as ornamental shaped tiles and as small negative spaces hidden in vast abstracted landscapes. Flowers, words and figures define shaped clay tiles and approach the definition and identity of the feminine, real or perceived. A ghost-like shape exits or enters flying through the corner of a strange room. A female figure in motion is suggested in the folds of the fabric, but the body is absent and the dresses move to the rhythm of dream or memory. A dress flies, dances or cartwheels in a balanced moment in time. “My attention is drawn to the permeable membrane between conditional reality and transcendence, the simultaneous layers of this human experience, our clothes and our invisible core.”
Joanna also makes birds. Functional clay bowls, vessels and planters whose wings nurture the space within. She also writes poetry, loves dancing and long walks on the beach.
Her ceramics, prints and paintings are in numerous private and corporate collections, and her work is represented in the Telfair Museums’ Jepson Center Store in Savannah, Georgia, and Gallery 4463 in Acworth, Georgia.
Joanna earned a Bachelor’s degree in English from Drew University and an MFA in Printmaking from the University of Georgia where she studied lithography with Charles Morgan and ceramics with Ron Meyers. She continues to study at the Penland School of Crafts through scholarships and workshops. Joanna is an Instructor of Ceramics, Printmaking, and Foundations at The University of South Carolina Beaufort. She also teaches Printmaking and Ceramics at Armstrong State University in Savannah.
Her work engages the form of the dress both in two-dimensional media and ceramic sculpture. Dresses appear as ornamental shaped tiles and as small negative spaces hidden in vast abstracted landscapes. Flowers, words and figures define shaped clay tiles and approach the definition and identity of the feminine, real or perceived. A ghost-like shape exits or enters flying through the corner of a strange room. A female figure in motion is suggested in the folds of the fabric, but the body is absent and the dresses move to the rhythm of dream or memory. A dress flies, dances or cartwheels in a balanced moment in time. “My attention is drawn to the permeable membrane between conditional reality and transcendence, the simultaneous layers of this human experience, our clothes and our invisible core.”
Joanna also makes birds. Functional clay bowls, vessels and planters whose wings nurture the space within. She also writes poetry, loves dancing and long walks on the beach.
Her ceramics, prints and paintings are in numerous private and corporate collections, and her work is represented in the Telfair Museums’ Jepson Center Store in Savannah, Georgia, and Gallery 4463 in Acworth, Georgia.
CONTACT INFO
You can find Joanna's work at the Telfair Museums' Jepson Center Store in Savannah, GA. Visit her website at http://artbyjanka.blogspot.com/ or feel free to email her directly with inquiries about her work at [email protected]
Also be sure to check out our personal interview with Joanna!
Also be sure to check out our personal interview with Joanna!