Joanna Powell, 2013–2014 Matsutani Fellow, 2014–2015 Windgate Fellow
long-term resident 2013–2015

Joanna Powell is a sculptor and painter born and raised in Dallas, Texas. Through installation she contextualizes common objects with personal meaning. Her work is the result of thinking about longing, privacy, history and sexuality. She draws inspiration from Etruscan and pre-Columbian pottery, Sèvres porcelain, folk art and Matisse. Her forms are excavated out of blocks of clay and pinched. “The pieces are more about touch than they are form,” says Joanna. While at the Bray she worked to listen to her intuition and absorb her surroundings, which inevitably changed her work.

Joanna received her MFA in ceramics from The University of Colorado at Boulder in 2012, and her BFA from The University of North Texas in Denton in 2008. She has exhibited her work throughout the US, including at the Showpen Gallery in Denver and The Center for Contemporary Craft in Pittsburgh. She began her long-term residency at the Bray in the fall of 2013 as the Matsutani Fellow and finished in the fall of 2015 as a 2014–2015 Windgate Fellow.

“What is it to really pay attention? I think about this question often and through the action of digging and pinching forms I am able to get lost and forget about an objects function in hopes to call attention to its possibilities as pure matter with its own intentions.

"I find beauty in my embarrassment. I live for the peculiar and the silly. Sometimes the objects are more about what they may taste like than look like.”

To see more work of Joanna's visit her website at joannapowellstudio.com.

A Simple Complicated Truth, 2014
earthenware, canvas, acrylic, plastic
10’ x 4’ x 7’9”

Braided Urn, 2014
earthenware, majolica
23.5" x 7" x 7"

First Impressions are the Worst, 2014
digital print, plastic fruit, pine, earthenware
71” x 42” x 16”