Studio Potter, Maine

Biography

Kari Radasch was born and raised in coastal Maine.  She received her BFA from the Maine College of Art in Portland, Maine, and her MFA from the University of Nebraska- Lincoln. She has been a resident at the IWCAT program in Tokoname Japan, the Watershed Center for Ceramic Arts.  She was an Emerging Artist at the 2004 NCECA in Indianapolis and was awarded the 2004-2005 Evelyn Shapiro Fellowship at The Clay Studio in Philadelphia. Kari is currently a studio potter living in Westbrook, Maine.

Kari Radasch’s cloyingly colorful terra-cotta pottery commemorates, celebrates and decorates life.  Her work pays homage to an array of ceramic traditions, while simultaneously borrowing forms from industrial and ancestral objects. Kari purposefully inscribes her pots with vestiges of their making, thus not only handmaking objects used for celebration, but celebrating the handmade.

Artist Statement

Making special is essential to daily life.
 -- Ellen Dissanayake
 Making pottery is worship of life itself.
 -- Bernard Leach

I view my work as a collage, as a series of layers.  Some of these layers are entrenched in the history of the material, some are absolute physical layers within the work. The historical layers are apparent in the homage I pay to a vast  array of ceramic traditions.  Aspects of Tang Dynasty and Oribe ware, European Porcelain, folk pottery, architectural terra cotta, industrial “kitsch”, and heirloom china are embedded in the objects I create.  I appropriate, hybridize, and dissect historical forms, industrial shapes, and ancestral objects as a place from which to generate ideas and pull molds.

In life I am most drawn to that which is decorative, celebratory, and outrageous.  I revel at architectural  embellishments, domestic sanctuaries, garden topiary, body adornment, curio cabinets, and ornamental cuisine. I am deeply affected by acts of “making special”.  I believe that through the ritual of “making special” one can connect with humankind and imbue the world with joy and beauty. It is from this perspective that I am most inspired to make decorative, often functional work.  I make objects to commemorate, celebrate, and decorate life.  My work is made for large congregations where both laughter and gastronomy are present. I am not only hand making objects used for celebration, but also celebrating the hand made.

I work with a rich and toasty earthenware.  I utilize it because of its adaptability, the way in which it responds to my touch, its visual weight, and its effect on clay and glaze interface., I inscribe my surfaces with physical layers of the making: rib marks, fingerprints, seam lines, pinched coils, canvas texture, and brush trails.  I choose to accentuate the human residue that industry seeks to hide. I am not interested in stereotypical refinement and perfection – I believe industry takes care of this. Instead, I want there to be a trace of the hand, a fired fingerprint, or an unglazed droplet of slip. I view these traces as a gift, as a part of me.

I am interested in challenging  our ideas about beauty that are traditionally associated with pottery.  I try to make the awkward and tawdry graceful and sublime. I am inclined to use excessive glaze combinations with a cloyingly sweet and syrupy flavor.  These surfaces are not archetypaly proportionate; they may even be bizarre.  Yet the glazes are rescued by the lusciousness of glaze itself.  I exploit glaze phenomenon, carefully calculating running, dripping, and pooling of this surface narcotic.

We seek to rub out the hand, to deny its existence, and to cover our “imperfection”. I court these vestiges of the hand.  I want my audience to appreciate my work like they might a written letter, a hand-stitched quilt, or a treasure from the garden. In her book Lists, Observations, and Counting, Squeak Carnwath states that,  “Art is evidence.  Evidence of breathing in and breathing out; proof of human majesty.” It is in the sharing of this evidence that the gift lies.