Figures of Speech

Service Description

In abstract figuration, the body isn't the subject; it's the grammar through which other subjects speak. In this class, students will build a visual language through the body, where sculpture becomes a site of personal, political, mythological, or historical inquiry. Students will develop their own abstract figurative language by completing two or more ceramic sculptures with a cohesive visual and conceptual vocabulary. Students will trace abstract figuration from modernist origins to contemporary practice through discussions, demos, and hands-on work, exploring reduction, exaggeration, and distortion of the body, from simple geometries to complex forms. Students will build sensitivity to the intangible: gesture, movement, mood, emotion. Through a continuous cycle of sketching, making, and iterating, students will discover how clay responds to different approaches and combine hybrid techniques to find new figurative forms. Students must possess a basic working knowledge of both wheel throwing and hand-building. They should be comfortable centering clay and throwing a simple bowl, as well as building basic forms using coils or slabs. About the Instructor: Peloloca is a Brooklyn-based artist whose work is shaped by transcontinental movement and interdisciplinary training. In their ceramic practice, they use hybrid wheel-thrown and hand-built processes to create abstract-figurative forms that function as counter-iconography: exploring power, speculative mythology and queer-feminist histories through the language of sculpture. Peloloca was recently a participating artist at the Drop Everything biennale on Inis Oírr, Ireland, and an artist-in-residence at the Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts in Maine, where they received the Angus Graham Fellowship Award. They exhibit regularly in New York and beyond, including at Powerhouse Arts, Stephen Street Gallery, Bau Gallery, BEVERLY'S, Center for Contemporary Art (NJ), and the Fallow Frames Biennial. They hold an MFA from Parsons School of Design and a BFA from Stella Maris College in Chennai, India. Website: Peloloca.com IG: @pe1o1oca