Artist Statement

​

The past year has been fraught with many challenges due to the pandemic. We have been physically isolated from each other. Many have personal pods of people that they can touch, hug, and act human with. Others, myself included here, are alone and removed from the physical world of human touch and interaction. A new paradigm of communication has begun for most of us; this ZOOM generation.  We adapt to it either willingly or kicking and screaming all the way. This is the way. 

 

I find my sense of touch in the material of clay. This year has forced me to slow down, look closely, discover in a different way.  Some of my recent works are about that sense of touch, drilling down into the layers or strata of different clays that are pounded together into a mass that when opened show up as found patterns and organic messages. This is my new process of discovery. Cutting, Squeezing, pinching, pushing, adding, subtracting, carving, scraping, and polishing.  I look for the space within as well as the interaction of forms without, relying on instinct, process and my long history with the material to find my way “home” when the work reaches its conclusion.

 

Lewis Rifkowitz