Josephine Burr

Artist Statement

From my perspective, the history of clay is mute and absorbent. It exists as a foundational, constant, and yet invisible presence – as pot, as brick, as toilet and basin, as earth. I respond to its silence and its capacity. It is a holder of time and of the unnoticed, of the underpinnings of consciousness and of daily life.

As an artist/maker, I am interested in probing at this unnoticed space, exploring how the temporality of experience can be distilled into visible, tactile form. The objects, drawings and installations I create are in a sense markers for the invisibilia that underlie our daily experience of being: the shifting terrain of presence, memory, and relationship.

Clay as a material speaks of the familiar and the immutable, while simultaneously carrying a sense of transition, fragility and porousness; I am constantly interested in engaging the tension between these qualities, through form, image and process. The process of making is an act of tactile listening, of attending fully to that fragile terrain at the edge of perception. It is my hope that this work offers the viewer a point of entry to linger and contemplate this floating and uncertain space.

-- Josephine Burr