Steven Nichols
Grand Canyon National Park Artist in Residence
Artist statement
Humans have stories cased inside, narratives that paint our character and define our shapes. Almost magically it feels that places and events have been tattooed or embedded into our souls.
I am interested in producing (Mural) 5ft x 5fth sized drawings on handmade paper that illustrates my own interpretations of the mythologies recognized and still practiced by the native people of this specific landscape and it’s Pageantry.
Life reduced to a vacuum of death gives every moment a dramatic focus, a sense of importance, as when a soldier on leave pleads for sex.
If the wind swallows our words as we speak, if our soothing picture of the world dissolves, like a family photograph on fire, and yet still we persevere, we feel resolute and noble. We watch our lives spiraling away like smoke. We applaud our sensitive response to intangible distinctions, and are content, like a soldier savoring his cigarette in bed.
Intimate and immediate are the words I wish to use to describe my goals when using the vehicle of clay. The magic that happens when our eyesight blurs and our fingers take over catches me. I live for impulse or moments and use any excuse to act on it. My speech is similar to my hand, exact in areas and spontaneously loud in others. Cherishing what is a human palette, I welcome fingerprints and all other unintentional marks, while believing in the hand and its evidence of freedom and exuberance.
Intuitively I hand build with clay and believe that ceramic art has the ability to allow our eyesight to blur and give way to touch. I enjoy wrestling with my work and have found clay to be the ideal material for the endeavor of transferring my ideas into a physical element, one that you could breath on or sleep with. The formation of a seed completes the process of reproduction and holds possible life in organic coats of nourishment. There are no technologies available to craft a complete new life, we can only alter existing systems and structures of life, our own brains hold information in with a system that is programmed to drop our seed and fabricate a new carrying structure. I spend large amounts of time and energy tracing my focus into ceramic objects with liberty and curiosity as my driving force, as an artisan I which to create aesthetic pleasures that imagine or hallucinate the reality of life’s density. The world is dense, and its pageantry is all around us. I observe and I am excited about the texture and tastes of an existence. My seeds are fertile, formed to highlight and speak for the potential they hold inside.
