Valleys

Valleys

Lauren Vanni
2008

Porcelain

28" x 27" x 21"

My work is a continuous process that involves tactile, meditative, and repetitive motions. Whether an entire environment made up parts or intimate objects to hold in your hand, most of my work possesses a sense of place, of landscape, and of belonging in their stillness. Forms are reduced to their essential shape, free of decoration and with limited surface treatment. Simplicity of form allows for subtleties to be explored. The work often involves visual contrasts. It is soft and hard, solid and hollow, identical and different, heavy and delicate, accidental and deliberate, playful and serious, representational and abstract. It cannot be easily categorized or named. Some work looks as if it emerged independent of human touch while other work reveal traces of human mark making and process. The clean interior of these organic forms contrast with the marked exterior from objects that created the form. For me, these forms can become containers of landscape: valleys, ledges, cliffs, rolling hills and plains. They are at once organic and geometric, places of security and spaces of freedom. In their material, scale, and repetition, they create a peaceful environment. “ . . . [W]hen my art is moving it is out of order. Stillness, silence, and peace are treasures which our mass culture is endlessly trying steal from us…If my work offers a sense of order, peace, and stillness to anyone, then it has succeeded.” -Carl Andre