Josephine Burr

From my perspective, the language of clay is mute and absorbent. It exists as a foundational, constant, and yet invisible presence – as pot, as brick, as toilet and basin, as earth. I respond to its silence and its capacity. It is a holder of time and of the unnoticed, of the underpinnings of consciousness and of daily life. As an artist/maker, I am interested in probing at this unnoticed space, coaxing the temporal and fleeting quality of experience into visible, tactile form. The objects, drawings and installations I create act as markers for the invisibilia that underlie our daily experience of being: the shifting terrain of presence, memory, and relationship. Through making, I seek to evoke an intuitive vocabulary of form and image that is at once collective and intensely personal. Clay as a material speaks of the familiar, the concrete and the immutable, while simultaneously carrying a sense of transition, fragility and porousness. I am constantly interested in engaging the tension between these qualities, through process, form and image. The process of making is an act of tactile listening, of attending fully to that fragile terrain at the edge of perception. It is my hope that the work offers the viewer a point of entry to linger and contemplate this floating and uncertain space.

Josephine Burr is a ceramic and mixed media artist based in Boston, MA.   She has exhibited and lectured nationally, and was a featured artist in the 2013 Biennial of the National Council on Ceramic Arts at the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft.  Recent artist residencies include Watershed Center for Ceramic Arts (ME), Greenwich House Pottery (NY), and Babson College (MA).  Ms. Burr received her MFA in Artisanry/Ceramics from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth in 2002.