Website: https://www.asiamathisart.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/asiamathisart/
Biography
Asia Mathis (BFA 1999) is a nationally exhibited ceramic artist working in Nashville, TN. She recently exhibited at the San Angelo Ceramics Competition, and at the International Sculpture Center. Asia also teaches sculpture workshops and classes year-round, most recently at the John C. Campbell Folk School in North Carolina.
Artist Statement
I create emotionally satisfying clay sculptures using the human figure, nature imagery, and abstraction. I hand-build my sculpture from stoneware clay and develop my surfaces over 3-4 firings in oxidation. I find it impossible to get myself close enough to the material of clay, the same way I wanted to climb inside the enormous magnolia tree in my grandparents’ yard growing up. I do not mean climb the tree, which I did hundreds of times, I mean climb inside it. I wanted to be it. An image will drop into me from the ether, and I am compelled to bring it to life through the clay.
In recent days the images that have been arriving are pointing to my human and non-human kin, singing about every kind of ancestor, are asking my hands to feel their way to "that porous line" (Mary Oliver, "White Flowers") where I can merge into the tree, or the rabbit, or the hands of my great, great, great grand-somebody who knew the forest as home, as family, and not a day trip.
Azores
Stoneware clay
20”h x 15”w x 15”d
2025
$1500