Lorraine Bonner

Visions In Clay 2022

Website:

www.lorrainebonner.com

Biography: 

Lorraine Bonner began working in clay in her 40’s, in response to the emergence of memories of severe childhood trauma. As her work evolved, it took on political and spiritual dimensions. She began to use the native colors of different clay bodies to express themes of domination, resistance and the unity of humanity across the spectrum of skin colors. Now retired after a thirty five year career as a physician, her latest series explores issues of brokenness and the beauty of healing, using the Japanese art form of kintsugi, in which broken ceramic pieces are mended with gold. She is also deeply concerned about the impending climate catastrophe and potential for human extinction, and is currently working on an installation which will hopefully heighten consciousness and encourage action to avert these calamitie.

Artist Statement: 

The three pieces in the current exhibition illustrate her central belief that without bearing witness, without actually seeing what is being done to us, we have no way of loosening the bonds of oppression, and will continually fight against one another in the delusion of separation and scarcity.
Privilege suggests the power, political and economic, which refuses to hear or see our suffering, or chooses not to, which spews out language which separates, excludes and incarcerates, and imposes scarcity and hierarchies of value with lethal force.
Hunger is made from a clay called Cassius Basaltic*. I began working with Cassius as my work evolved, from the chaos of the first onslaught of traumatic memories, to placing those experiences in the context of political supremacism. Cassius is myself, as a child, a Black woman, a human being, a thread in the tapestry of planet Earth, as all of us, in a world ruled by sociopaths. Hunger represents all our hungers, for food, water, shelter, trusting relationships, security, safe contact, all intensifying as we careen toward ecological suicide.
Start ‘Em Early: there are so many ways we are torn from our mothers and placed in chains. It was blatant in the times of the enslavement of people of African descent and the kidnapping of Native children. We all saw it at the southern border, but we rarely see the millions trafficked today. Do we even notice the chains that our ideas about “manliness,” “femininity,” and “independence,” place on our children, ourselves?

 

Privilege
Big White clay, fired in oxidation to cone 5; barbed wire, bullet 
20" x 14" x 28"
2009
$2,400

Hunger
*Cassius Basaltic (now called Obsidian) fired in oxidation to cone 5
25" x 10" x 12"
2012  
$2,000

Start ‘Em Early  
*Cassius Basaltic (now called Obsidian) and Nara porcelain, fired in oxidation to cone 5  
17.2" x 8" x 8"
2014  
$2,200