Patti Warashina: Story-Age Container, 2023-2024
As an artist, the human figure has absorbed and fascinated my visual curiosity for most of 60-year plus career. This sustaining interest is probably because my own body is my most immediate resource, in terms of its psychological and physical proximity. While observing the interaction of every day life and its interwoven parts, the human form has given me a reference point to my own existence, as a marker of personal time, and the civilization in which I live, almost like a personal visual diary.
I often use the figure in voyeuristic situations in which irony and absurdities portray erratic behavior, as a way of finding comic relief from societal pressures and frustrations. It is my way of escaping the doubts and disharmony of human nature and its routines, and role playing scenarios to my liking, like a child playing with dolls. The political and societal problems that exist in our world today also seem to provoke visual images which often inform my work. These figures have become the actors in my introspective narratives.
My current work involves further analyses of the figure by exploring the surface in a purely two-dimensional inquiry. This allows me to minimize embellishment, detail, and color through simple abstract form as a reference to an unspecified time. I want the two-dimensional surface work to seem independent of the three-dimensional form of the figure, as though it is passing over the figure, thereby giving illusion to two independent spatial realities coinciding with one another. This reductive abstract surface has seemed to further eliminate the need for realistic surface painting, in this case clothes, and works in tandem with the simplification of the body and form. What remains with the figure over time is the narrative nature of the subject matter and details of facial features and extremities. The elimination of these components in future exploration remains to be seen.
Captions
- Fish in Hot Water (2023), Earthenware, underglaze, glaze , 12.5 x 7.5 x 7.5 HWD in
- Burp! (2023), Earthenware, underglaze, glaze, 12.5 x 8 x 9.5 HWD in
- Inverted Canopy (2024), Earthenware, underglaze, glaze, 8 x 9 x 8 HWD in
- Ink Slinger (2024), Earthenware, underglaze, glaze, 10 x 11.5 x 7.5 HWD in
- Adrift in the Blue (2023) Story-Age Series, Earthenware, underglaze, glaze, 11 x 11 x 10 HWD in
- Captain Puff B (2024), Earthenware, underglaze, glaze 12.5 x 7 x 8 HWD in
- Captain Puff C (2024), Earthenware, underglaze, glaze, 11 x 7.5 x 8.5 HWD in
- Discovering Your Roots (2024), Earthenware, underglaze, glaze, 17.5 x 5.5 x 5.5 HWD in
- Dodge Ball (2023) Story-Age Series, Earthenware, underglaze, glaze, 11.5 x 10 x 8 HWD in
- It’s Your Lucky Day! (2024), Earthenware, underglaze, glaze, 13.5 x 7 x 6 HWD in
- Planetary Totem (2024), Earthenware, underglaze, glaze, 13 x 12 x 4 HWD in
- I Wish There Was Some Distance Between Us (2024), Earthenware, underglaze, glaze, 8.0 x 14.5 x 7.0 HWD in
- Ka Ching With Red Ball (2023), Earthenware, underglaze, glaze, enamel, 10 x 13, x 5 HWD in
- Life is Spinning (2023) Story-Age Series, Earthenware, underglaze, glaze, 11 x 9.5 x 13 HWD in
- Somehow I Don’t Fit In (2023), Earthenware, underglaze, glaze, 11 x 6.5 x 11 HWD in
- Star Struck (2024), Earthenware, underglaze, glaze , 10.5 x 8 x 7.5 HWD in
- Vegetarian Swim (2023), Earthenware, underglaze, glaze, 12 x 7.5 x 7 HWD in
