Clay as Multitool
with Amanda Leigh Evans / May 2022
About the Studio Session
On my keychain I carry a faded black Swiss Army knife. It has a tiny pair of scissors, a dull knife, a file with a screwdriver, warped tweezers, and an empty void that once housed a scratchy plastic toothpick. I never used the toothpick, but I liked to fidget with it in my pocket (which is probably how I lost it). The tool belonged to my grandfather, and in addition to the functions it performs, it is a container for the relationship I shared with him. I am reminded of his big, soft hands when I open packages or tighten a screw. Can we make a ceramic multitool that is equally and enduringly as personal, meaningful, and functional as this Swiss Army knife?
The various contexts encountered during the life of a clay object—from the studio to an artist’s living room, a museum exhibition, a botanical garden, a corporate lobby, or a hospital hallway—will influence that object’s capacity to simultaneously perform practical, relational, and symbolic functions. Can an object’s identity shift throughout its existence? Can a sculpture made for a contemporary art exhibition go on to have a secret second life? Could sculptures have built-in retirement plans? Through open-ended discussions and experimentation (including everything from collaborative invention of absurd apparatuses to playing conceptual pranks) we will explore the relational and use-value aesthetics of clay.
About the Lead Artist
Amanda Leigh Evans (b. 1989) is an artist, educator, and cultivator seeking a deeper understanding of our social and ecological interdependence. She makes clay objects, gardens, books, websites, videos and sculptures, and participates in collaborative systems. Evans holds an MFA in Art + Social Practice from Portland State University and a Post-Bac in Ceramics from Cal State Long Beach. She was raised in the Inland Empire and in rural Nevada County, CA, and lives and works in the Pacific Northwest.
From 2016 to 2021, Evans lived and worked as an artist-in-residence in a 120-unit affordable housing apartment complex in East Portland, OR. There, in collaboration with her neighbors, she cultivated The Living School of Art, an intergenerational art collective and alternative art school. Since 2014, she has been a collaborating artist at KSMoCA, a contemporary art museum inside a public elementary school in NE Portland, OR. Currently, she is a Visiting Professor teaching ceramics and social practice at Whitman College in Walla Walla, WA.