HARRISBURG – The simply shaped, ceramic forms created by contemporary artist Meredith Brickell are on exhibit in “Field Drawings” Oct. 31-Nov 23 at the Rose Lehrman Art Gallery on the Harrisburg Campus of HACC, Central Pennsylvania’s Community College.
Brickell, an instructor at DePauw University in Greencastle, Ind., will present a lecture 5:30-6:30 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 3, in Whitaker Hall 214. A reception will follow in the gallery from 6:30-7:30 p.m. All events are free and open to the public.
Brickell’s work, largely made of clay, is often composed of landscapes of objects. The markings take a journey around and sometimes through the vessels. Brickell compares this experience to that of experiencing a large landscape vista.
“Although the pots I create are intimate in scale, they borrow form the vastness of the landscape,” she said.
These landscapes may reference the pastoral, the urban or the personal. “These quickly rendered ceramic forms are visual representations of a memory of an object, rather than the actual object itself; therefore, allowing the ambiguous forms to exist in a murky space somewhere between the familiar and unfamiliar.
“Our conception of the world is informed by the environments in which we reside—from the infinite landscape to the contained spaces of architectural structures to the details of small objects. These places and possessions describe and define us,” said Brickell.
Actively exhibiting both nationally and internationally, Brickell’s work can be found in Yingge Ceramics Museum, Taiwan and the San Angelo Museum of Fine Arts, Texas. She has received numerous awards, among them a 2009 residency at Watershed Center for Ceramic Arts, Maine; a silver prize at the Taiwan Ceramics Biennale; and artist-in-residence, award 1, at the International Ceramic Research Center in Denmark.
Brickell received a bachelor’s degree of art and design from North Carolina State University, College of Design in Raleigh and a master’s degree of fine arts from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She attended Penland (N.C.) School of Crafts Core Fellowship Program.
Fall gallery hours are 11 a.m.-3 p.m. Monday-Friday, 5-7 p.m. Tuesday and Thursday, or by appointment. For more information, call 717-780-2435 or email Kim Banister, gallery curator, at kebanist@hacc.edu. Visit the gallery on the HACC website: www.hacc.edu under the Rose Lehrman Arts Center and on Facebook.
The Brickell lecture is funded by the Nadar Family Fund. The Rose Lehrman Art Gallery receives state arts funding support through a grant from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, a state agency funded by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency.
