Gwendolyn Yoppolo, 2009–2010 Lincoln Fellow
resident 2008–2010
 Gwendolyn received her MFA from Penn State University in 2006. Since that time she has served as Assistant Professor of Art at Juniata College in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania, and also as a Studio Technician at Alfred University. She was the 2008 Archie Bray Myhre Scholar and most recently the 2010 Lincoln Fellow.
While at Penn State she received two fellowship awards for her research using the scanning electron microscope and continues to work with this instrument to photograph the tiny landscapes of beach rubble, sugar cereals, plant seeds and insect parts. This photography work is visually stimulating and opens up thoughts about the scale of human life. These thoughts infuse her imagination as she works with porcelain.
"As I embody immaterial forms through attentive touch in clay, my body speaks in gestures and spaces. Its words are vessels whose form is a lens inflecting my inner world for others to experience sensually, thus reflecting to them their own human existence. Creating objects that relate to the hand of the user preserves a human scale in time, space, and relationship. A human scale implies living in a state of immediacy, with touch that allows for response, with action that allows for reflection, and with relationship that allows for reciprocity. With sensitivity to the wisdom of my body, I translate inner forms into an emptiness that will contain, or offer, or filter, or extend.
The forms I make are holding environments for our moments of reverie and nourishment; they are made to increase human intimacy. The metaphoric power of vessels as containers for lived experience occupies my work, as my focus is on the intangibles of life: emotions, memories, dreams, and ideas. The emptiness within these forms is more than a physical receptacle. It is a hesitancy, a receptivity, a potentiality: the airy absorbency of a cotton ball, the silence between words, the sleep between days. Within the negative spaces lies an absence that is also a presence."
To view more artwork by Gwendolyn go to her website at www.gwendolynyoppolo.com. |
