Incredibly enriching and even life-saving, contemporary modes of connectivity can also miss the mark. Sometimes they end up a mess. A tangled cord, a dangling phrase, a feeble synapse, a knotted net. Through ever-webbing and deepening systems however, we keep reaching out, casting lines, seeking intersection. Sometimes we overlap. We treasure that tingling dopamine blast at the ting of a message arrival: it could change our lives, love is near, an answer awaits.
These “analog printed” (handmade) clay, fiber, mixed-media forms and drawings grapple with the layered tensions of negative spaces – between bodies and minds, places and times – and the habitual devices we use to navigate them. They examine, embody, and celebrate the ambiguous, shifting, and transforming power of messages, words, and phrases and the invisible threads of context behind attempts at communication. Like rows of woven fabric or sentences in a journal, lines of liquid clay are carefully layered by hand to build these text vessels and trace the evolution of virtual thought into visceral object.
Stephanie Lanter has been an artist and educator working in clay, fiber, mixed media and words since 2000. Currently the Assistant Professor of Ceramics at Emporia State University in Kansas, she previously taught at Washburn and Wichita State Universities. She was fortunate enough to be one of the founding resident artists at the Red Lodge Clay Center in Montana in 2006, and also has had residencies at the Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Colorado and the Mendocino, California Arts Center. In 2004 she was the first Jentel/Archie Bray Foundation “Critic at the Bray” in Sheridan, Wyoming and Helena, Montana. In summer 2017, she will be a summer resident at the Archie Bray Foundation and the LH Project in Joseph, Oregon.
Along with exhibiting artwork internationally, she has written for and been featured in journals such as Ceramics Monthly, and Ceramics, Art and Perception. In 2010, she received a Kansas Arts Commission Collaboration Grant to support the interdisciplinary installation, community outreach, and publication series, The Waiting Room Projects, an ongoing and internationally exhibited collaboration led by Marguerite Perret and in conjunction with Bruce Scherting, Robin Lasser, Sarah Smarsh, and others. She received an MFA from Ohio University in 2002 and a BA from Xavier University in 1998.
