Studio Sessions
Residue
with Nicole Seisler
January 2022
About the Studio Session
Residue, remnants, remainders, byproducts, castoffs, cut-offs, discards, edits, fragments: these aspects and fractions accumulate—sometimes purposefully, sometimes inadvertently—through our processes of making artwork. Are they inherently less valuable or worthy than the objects that occupy the central focus of our making? Or do these crumbs, loops, lumps, piles and shards contribute additional meaning that bolsters the prioritized work? Do they complete the prioritized work? Can the residue become the prioritized work? This Studio Session focuses upon creating platforms/stages/homes/containers and approaches/tools/methods/systems for holding, elevating, and speaking to the displaced materials and objects of our practices—and perhaps also the displaced parts of ourselves.
About the Lead Artist
Nicole Seisler creates dialogue and perspectives around ceramics that exist in the same conditions as the material: malleable, shifting, adaptable, and enduring; existing within, between, and beyond conventional definitions.
Three interdependent, mutually-reinforcing areas comprise Nicole’s practice: making, educating, and curating. This tripod enables each aspect to support the others, thereby creating a platform for her broader, pluralistic vision for ceramics as a conceptual field.
Nicole received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) and her BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She has exhibited her work at museums ranging from the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and the Museum of Fine Arts Tallahassee to the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago and Craft Contemporary in Los Angeles. Her work was recently featured in a solo exhibition at the American Museum of Ceramic Art in Pomona, CA, and the two-person exhibition In Hand: Contemporary Material Engagements with the Built World at the Kennedy Museum at Ohio University.
Nicole has taught ceramics for almost fifteen years at as many universities — from SAIC and the University of Washington, to Scripps College and UCLA — and she is currently Assistant Professor and Head of Ceramics at Lewis & Clark College.
As Founder and Director of the contemporary ceramics platform A-B Projects, Nicole has curated forty exhibitions and offers alternative educational programming that reevaluates and redefines the trajectory of contemporary ceramics.
Logistics
This session took place in January 2022.