Kate Nelson: "It was a small country, everyone was famous" Lecture

Kate Nelson took a new approach with ceramics and sculpture. Her undergraduate degree consisted of her making bottomless cylinders with uneven, organic textures upon them. She worked with preliminary sketches before she started wood firing her pieces into the organic cylinders. At this point in her life, she was tired of creating functional ceramics. So her sculptures were mainly just for aesthetics with no story behind them.

She then created a series of lidded vessels inspired by Japanese history while using a variety of materials such as rubber and cement. She still liked to wood fire her pieces. This series was still mainly for aesthetic purposes with no story or meaning behind it. Basically, Kate was also creating a series of bell jars that was pleasing to the eye but not functional.

Kate graduated, and started to attack the surface of her sculptures. She started putting words to songs in her sculptures to add a story behind the art she was creating. She then started looking at Charles Adams who was a creator of children's books and she also looked at movie stills when she became inspired to create figures, such as humans and animals alike, a story with every sculpture that included witty comments on them. She used stoneware and fell in love with the medium.

Kate's true calling came when she started looking at Henry Moore's sculptures where he creates abstract forms with aspects of a figure entwined within every sculpture.

 "But she want's to be sure because, you know, sometimes words have two meanings"

Kate began to create organic vessels with sand and glazes. At this point in her career, she started working with porcelain. She continued to observe television stills to create a story with her sculptures and added lyrics from songs to tell more of a story with the situations presented in the lyric and her use of intimate objects.

I liked the fact that I knew exactly what I was looking at when viewing her work, where I envisioned the situation between the two sculptures when reading the lyric presented. Me as an artist and me as a pedestrian simply basking in this type of art, thirsts for meaning behind why this was created in the first place and I felt like my thirst was quenched when seeing her art and her interpretation of the sculptures she created. In short, it wasn't just left up to me to interpret what I was seeing.

She put a lot of thought and care into what she was trying to convey with her audience, and she was in full control of her audience when showing her artwork. I think that when you are doing abstract artwork, I hate the fact that I have to do all the thinking and observing when a work is untitled. Often, abstracted art that is untitled doesn't get my attention as much and I spend seconds upon those artworks untitled. I like this execution of abstracted art much better.