Judd Schiffman

Lives and works in Providence, RI, USA

Artist statement

Using clay as a drawing material, my ceramic wall sculptures are a psychedelic concoction of lived experience, mythology, domestic life, and imagined worlds. The work explores masculinity, sexuality, and the fragile idea of a self, along with the guilt, confusion, tenderness, and elation that can accompany these experiences. Fatherhood has become particularly important to the work, both as a profound transformation of identity and as a source of intimacy, vulnerability, and uncertainty. I often portray animals and mythological creatures alongside relics and objects from nature. In the studio, the clay is drawn on, pushed, twisted, and cut into crystals, plants, mushrooms, and candles that surround figures in tender rites of passage. Layered glaze application accentuates carvings and sculptural forms, giving the narratives a vivid physical presence. Installed on the wall, relief tiles are often surrounded by ceramic enclosures, transforming the works into reliquaries for the bodies within. I am interested in these animals as surrogates through which I can explore human emotion and behavior. Creatures traditionally associated with fear, danger, or masculinity become clumsy, tender, erotic, contemplative, or absorbed in strange private rituals. They inhabit a world in which myth, family life, memory, and fantasy overlap. My studio practice is closely connected to my meditation practice and to an ongoing questioning of the nature of the self. Buddhist texts and ideas sometimes...

Artwork