Amber Rane Sibley: Selected works, 2020-2022

Amber Rane Sibley: Selected works, 2020-2022

Amber Rane Sibley’s work explores the unexamined imprisonments that result from narrative identity. The figures that populate her work are surrogates for the collective. They are vessels of self-delusion and self-mythology, crippled creatures debilitated by their own will. They are superior limb-less and nonprehensile with often voluntarily obstructed vision. And yet they make no effort to change their lot. As Sibley excavates the darkened caves of the professed chosen, spiritually special, or the habitually inert she discovers the frightened inner child seeking bedtimes stories to quell the tortures of waking-life. She offers them portraits to embody the fear, the unknowns, and the examination of their actualities. And so the figures become deceptively hopeful, candied representations of the not-knowing, of the un-chosen, and of the ignorant. Do we greet them then as helpless companions in need of aid or the dark mirrors we’ve avoided?

Sibley prizes ceramic for the way it parallels the uniquely human themes that are central to her work; its invitation to imperfection, the primariness of the human hand that crafts it, and the revealed mysteries of its processes—just as one’s narrative identity requires time to show its effects and can never truly be predicted, so too goes the outcome of a glazed and fired form.

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