Alison Kudlow

Lives and works in Brooklyn, NY, USA

Artist statement

With my hand-built ceramic forms I evoke the surreal plasticity I experienced when my body’s shape and functionality transformed during illness, surgery, pregnancy, birth, and lactation. My work explores complex negotiations with the body in flux, conjuring the more porous, alien, and fluid conditions of human be-ing. I capture glass in mid-motion so that it seeps upward from orifices and drips downward from crevices, pooling and frothing in the ceramic forms. I have developed kiln programs to heat glass until it is viscous and then drop the temperature to pause the drips. The resulting glass appears liquid and embodies heat, gravity, and time. Arrested in motion, the sculptures seem forever in the process of becoming. The sculptures suggest a fuzziness between human and human-made, plant and mineral, connoting infinite fluid possibilities. I complicate their organic form and fragile materiality with metal interventions that reference the built environment. They are somehow simultaneously doughy and bony. They ooze and pucker and open. They are beings and body parts in turn. They are plantlike, carnivorous, and geological. They are quiet and they are achingly loud.

Artwork