Kathryn Agnes Baczeski is a visual artist from Southbury Connecticut. She received her BFA in Sculpture with a concentration in Ceramics from the University of Connecticut in 2009. She earned her MFA from Indiana University - Bloomington in 2016. Baczeski is currently a resident an instructor of art living and working in Cedar Rapids Iowa.
Artist Statement
I want to reach inside the mouth of ceramics and pull its innards out, flipping it inside out to expose it’s processes then spin it around and send it on a whole new blind direction!
What is the difference between swimming and drowning? The absurd is profound. I am looking for that place when it is no longer swimming nor drowning, no longer absurd or profound. What’s that feel and look like; I WANT for that catharsis in clay.
That is not to say, that I don’t draw from my life experiences and from this shared cultural phenomena as a spring-head. But once the arrow is aloft it’s on it’s own. I can’t cage my work. It breathes and grows as it contracts, and contracts as it grows. I haven’t the space for fragile attachments to my work’s longevity. Even my fired pieces are fragile and temporal, just handling them changes their form as bits and pieces fall off. It is this form of collaboration and performance I am interested in.
My work is personal and private in many ways but vulnerable enough leaving an open door for the viewer to add their own script. I am constantly striving to ask the right questions through making work that is familiar and disjointed, funny yet menacing, and teetering on the duality of known and the unknown. I find myself literally bathing in this material in an attempt to gain more information from it by pushing up against it with all of my body.
kathryn.baczeski@gmail.com