Nancy Selvin

This intriquing work is by Nancy Selvin. You can see more of her work at http://www.mudfire.com/

Nancy Selvin’s work is imbued with a quite nostalgia, warm earth tones, parched yet with an inherent vibrancy. They are still-life compositions of bottles and books, formed in rich terra cotta and finished with painterly strokes of slips and under-glazes and enigmatic shards of poems, quotes or recipes. “I like the concept of referencing functional issues, but don’t want to be bound by function,…By dealing with the bottle abstractly, I am able to transcend reality.” The sculptures conjure images of elixir containers or tomes of ancient spells and rituals by their faded, fragmented labeling. The surfaces are painterly with a rough eloquence of colored layers and transcribed memories. Selvin strives for her work to possess a “quality of sparseness, leaving much unsaid, hinting at, but without a direct narrative.” - Baltimore Calyworks