Hunter Stamps

Artist Statement

 

 

This body of work investigates how the mind collects and organizes fragmented images from memory in order to continuously recreate a sense of history and self. The work manipulates, abstracts, and conceptualizes the body’s material and psychological reality.  The intent of my work is to seduce and engage the viewer with temporal surfaces and organic formal abstractions that trigger meditation on the mutability of the mind and body.

 

Psychological phobias, obsessions, aberrations, and anxieties are communicated through the tension and gesture of my formal language. Certain images and surfaces resonate in my mind and are synthesized into abstract visualizations for my sculptures.  These visual references include cropped figurative photographs, scientific medical displays and other images of contortion, deformity and fluidity.  This process of organic abstraction uses a vocabulary of reference to the body’s physicality without any literal details.

 

The physicality of my ceramic process exploits the malleability of clay and its tendency to convey the elasticity and muscularity of the body. The forms themselves are often thrown on the wheel, altered and then assembled to achieve the desired changing repetition of form.  Surface treatments range from specially formulated low-fire glazes to atmospheric firings to mixed-media rubber, encaustic and resin applications. To further deny the interpretation of a coherent whole, the exterior of my sculptures are often intentionally irregular and penetrative, creating a temporal experience of the body that is at once internal and external.