Carol and Richard Selfridge

Edmonton, Alberta, Canada

Title: Hera and the Pear Tree

Year of Creation: 2008

Glaze: Majolica

Clay Body: Terra cotta majolica

Dimensions: Height 28.5 inches, Width 15 inches

Artist's Statement: Our way of creating the large illusionistic pots could best be termed constructivist with ready-mades. We make round and oval discs by press molding, which are then cut and altered, stacked and joined to form segmented pots. By using ovals cut on the bias, we can get gestural pots with a lot of movement. We like the way they look much like a pot in a painting by Matisse, Braque or Picasso. With their cut down front rim and slightly comic handles, they become a kind-spirited caricature of historic "real" pots.

We are interested in painting flat things to look round and round things to look flat. These pots are about perception; that is, those visual clues that let us know the nature and dimension of things. With color, pattern, figure/ground, shading, silhouette and by using many "universal referent's", we create visual gaps that the viewer fills up with their own constructed reality.

Out pots usually have illusionistic pot or a pot-on-a-pot "front" side and the reverse side often becomes a shaped canvas for a figurative/narrative glaze painting. With figurative, classical and humorous imagery, we try to join the gestural quality of drawing and painting with the innate gesture of ceramic vessels. These vessels present the viewer with the ambiguity of classical themes and contemporary painting.