Nancy Selvin

"Craft is the idea made visible. These painterly teapots take their clue from the Abstract Expressionist approach that is such a strong component of our contemporary ceramic heritage. Spare and poetic, these casual-seeming constructions reflect on the tradition of use and the materialness of clay itself."Nancy Selvin ceramics

Nancy Selvin is interested in the arrangement of objects. Her still-lifes are investigations of process, studies of form and space, of functionality as an illusion.

Text from her art notebooks is incorporated into her pots for visual purposes rather than literary ones, though reading them could provide insight into her life as a ceramics artist: notes, reflections, sketches, glaze recipes.

Selvin's teapots are handbuilt over foam armatures. Areas that remain terra cotta are masked with latex, then brushed and rubbed with layers of underglaze. She often uses a ceramic pencil to create lines and define portions of the form, adding silkscreened images or text before firing. Achieving a surface that records the investigation of process, the mark of the hand.

Contact Nancy at:
745 Page Street
Berkeley, CA 94710
PHONE: (510) 524-8323

 

Artists Directory