Tara Thacker
At the heart of my artwork is a love of materiality and an ongoing fascination with the process of transformation. I am absorbed in a labor-intensive creative process, bordering on obsessive. Each individual part is unique and serves as an architectural component which I combine in various ways to discover how they behave visually. I want even more to make something of it, to transcend its initial existence, and create a new, unforeseen surface or landscape. Through abstraction I aim to draw a connection between observation and memory.
Clay is my material of choice not only for it’s for tactile beauty and malleability, but also for the technical and historical challenges that come with it. It is my intention to make works that you don’t immediately associate as being ceramic. The works often appear soft or to be made of fabric rather than the hard fired surface that they are.
My newest work takes inspiration from folklore of the avian world. These works include a series of wall sculptures made in a variety of materials such as porcelain, black clay, lead, and wood as well as a suite of collagraph prints. These works continue to use themes of repetition of form and material transformation to create layered, tactile works that lend reference to the shadows created by my sculptures, nocturnal landscapes, and the wing structures of Corvidae (the crow family) & Falconidae (falcons).
Tara Thacker May 2023