Material Encounters / Human Findings
with Désirée Coral / April 2022
About the Studio Session
As artists, are we makers or revealers? Perhaps the ‘encounter,’ a point of unexpected connection or collaboration between the human and Mother Nature, positions us as both. In such an encounter, nature often overcomes the hand, thereby altering or completing the artist’s work. For example: humans harvest clay from the land and wind sculpts their aggressive marks into soft, repetitive curves; barnacles grow upon shipwreck-buried porcelain teacups, thereby building more complex and glorious sculptures than the original slip-caster ever imagined; or months of sunshine upon unmoved objects bleaches a pattern of discoloration onto a table surface that couldn’t be drawn by hand. Whether occurring in short bursts or across centuries, these moments of symbiosis between artist and nature are the crux of this Studio Session. Participants will use photographs, objects, and stories to seed conversation, experimentation, and their own material encounters.
About the Lead Artist
Désirée Coral is (b. 1981 in Quito, Ecuador) earned her MFA in Ceramics from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and was a student at the Moncloa School of Ceramics in Madrid where she learned the “craft”. She previously completed her undergraduate studies in Visual Arts at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Quito. Coral is currently a PhD candidate at the Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design at the University of Dundee in Scotland UK, where she investigates the material relationship between human and non-human beings through color and its materiality. She has exhibited and published internationally.