Wade Tullier

Lives and works in Baton Rouge, LA

Artist statement

I make ceramic sculptures from recognizable forms: hands, fruit, plants, skulls, owls, knives, and flames, drawn from the objects, creatures, and symbols around us. Shifting their scale, proportion, and orientation gives them new associations without erasing what they already are. My sculptures are built as physical stacks, one form attached to the next and fused into a single standing structure. Fusion holds them in contact, but it doesn’t close the distance between them. Fusing objects puts them into relation without settling what they are. Meaning emerges through encounters between objects, their relationships, and the systems of association that shape how we understand them. That way of seeing is collective, learned through a vocabulary of culture and symbol. Humans encounter, understand, remember, communicate, desire, organize, and relate to one another through a world of things. Arrangement works the same way at scale. Refusing to separate the object from relation mirrors my refusal to separate nature from culture. Culture is nature continuing through us. Clay makes this continuity literal: earth shaped by human hands into cultural form. Each piece is hand-built from coils of clay, as much assembled as grown. Glazing extends this continuity through bright gloss, creamy mattes, and raw surfaces. Everything the forms pass through leaves a trace rather than erasing what came before. A form can stand alone while carrying the history of relations that produced it. Grouped...

Artwork