Forest Park
Host: Nancy Gardner in the backyard of her home & studio
Nancy is an award winning potter with an extensive exhibition record with work published in several ceramics collections. Her husband Burt is a sculptor and college art professor. They have been collaborating on their pottery since 1988.
Jenny Mendes’ work is intimate in scale, with the energy of a reverent mysterious prayer - a meditation on wholeness, the cosmos, cycles of life and death, the tangible/intangibility of human connection and peace. Her process is to tease out and play with a story or image that arises during the arch of time spent with each piece, trusting the alchemy of intuition and material.
Forming function, a dance, often a tug of war, between though and object making. Add to this dialogue the sheer joy of working with clays as materially responsive as porcelain and surfaces only possible through glaze fusion. A dynamic is created which becomes a life-long fascination.
Roberta’s thrown, altered, carved and gestural pieces are intimate forms that fit and feel good in my hand. While they are generally not representations of actual objects, they reflect the shapes, patterns, colors and surfaces that she is drawn to in nature that inform and inspire her work. She lives Oak Park, Illinois where she herds two cats, keeps up her old house and her overgrown garden.
Mike Stumbras’ work explores the beauty and horror of existential uncertainty. The work addresses design elements of 18th and 19th-century European production ceramics, but it is created with the immediacy and individuality of wheel-throwing and hand-building processes. My work seeks to provoke thoughts about the enduring impact of material culture on societal, artistic, and craft-oriented structures.
Molly Anne Bishop is a ceramicist, illustrator, and designer in Chicago. Molly has spent the last ten years building a brand and product line around her playful and humorous illustration style. Her favorite medium is clay, and she uses her hand built functional pottery as a canvas for cartoonish narratives inspired by pop culture, the natural world, and her own real life.