Art | Women Artists Pushing Sculpture Forward, Many Via Clay

CFILE––This article was first published by Artsy shedding some serious light on female artists challenging the field of sculpture, but in true ceramophile fashion, however, we’re highlighting those who are rocking the field using clay.

Featured image: Genesis Belanger, Acquiescence (bent hand), 2018

Genesis Belanger

Brooklyn-based artist Genesis Belanger‘s familiar, yet surreal sculptures––humorously droopy, wavy, and even erotic––”needle affectionately at human foibles and appetites,” as Artsy writes.

The artist’s objects are something like human surrogates, reflecting personalities and flaws—“our desire, gluttony, obsession with power,” as Belanger said. “My objects reflect all the base and instinctual parts of our psychology. The parts that make us fantastic, and a bit fucked up.”

Monika Grabuschnigg

Berlin-based Monika Grabuschnigg’s large-scale, pastel hued sculptures aim to capture the implications of contemporary love, desire and longing for connection, according to her artist bio.

In a society in which capitalism has created emotional precarity, where narcissism and self-marketing, non-commitment and Xanax are the toolbox for intimate encounters with others, Grabuschnigg’s intensely physical works treat love as a philosophically and culturally vital topic. Wrestling with its always multiple, layered narratives, her sculptures seek to incarnate love, to reveal how it informs and is informed by everything from political systems to social relations.

Artsy adds her sculptures are like contemporary fetish objects, suggestive of “phalluses, organs, or bodily orifices.”

Kris Lemsalu

Estonian artist Kris Lemsalu is “known for pushing materials to unexpected and sometimes subversive places, often combining ceramic sculpture with found materials to create wacky tableau that suggest ambiguous narratives or become stages and props for performances.”

Marie Herwald Hermann

The Detroit-based Danish artist’s “quiet arrangements of tactile, orderly objects seem, at first, to speak in a language familiar to a Kinfolk generation that has turned Donald Judd’s brand of minimalism into a shared common denominator,” Artsy writes. Her gentle color explorations and research in the spacial relationships between her objects, Hermann’s geometric assemblages imbue clarity and balance.

See more of Hermann’s work here.

Julia Phillips

Splitting her time between Berlin and Chicago, German-born artist Julia Phillips‘ installations feature a tableau of ceramic muzzles, masks, metal armatures and tiled floors, as Artsy writes, adding they’re like artifacts of medical operations, corporal constraint even sexual domination.

Juliana Cerqueira Leite

Striving to catalyze transformation, American artist Juliana Cerqueira Leite‘s works explore the behavior of the human body and the residue of physical actions. For her sculpture Climb (2012) the artist hollowed out a tunnel of clay by clawing and digging her way through, which she then cast the negative space left by her physical efforts.

Read Artsy‘s original article here featuring female sculptors in various mediums.

Love or loathe these female ceramists pushing the field of contemporary sculpture and contemporary ceramics? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.