2010 MFA Artist: Janet Macpherson
Janet Macpherson's Artist Statement
From staring overwhelmed at larger than life religious statuary, to reciting the eerie drone of the Catholic liturgy, my religious upbringing frames many of my remembered experiences. I am fascinated by Christian martyrs and find the fragmentation and deformation of their bodies resonates with me as I struggle to make peace with my upbringing.. In my recent work have been altering slip-cast statues of saints using a variety of methods. I replace the heads with heads of other animals mask faces with colored under-glazes or gold luster. I leave the seams exposed to echo the mold-making process but also to suggest the fragmentation of the martyred saint’s body and its reduction to a collection of parts. The juxtaposition of incongruous components suggests that they have been put back together in the “wrong†way, and through this manipulation I hope to subvert the way that these icons function in the context of Catholic beliefs.
About the Artist
Janet Macpherson (b. 1974) was born in Toronto and grew up in Barrie, Ontario. She received her BA in philosophy from York University in 1997 then studied functional ceramics at The Sheridan Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning from 1999 to 2002. She subsequently maintained a successful studio practice in Toronto for six years, exhibiting her work at several galleries and stores there, as well as in Portland, Oregon, at the Museum for Contemporary Craft, and in Hong Kong at the Pottery Workshop. She is currently completing her MFA in ceramics at The Ohio State University and has shifted from making functional vessels to expressive, figurative ceramics, focusing mainly on the mold-making process.
