Past Recipient 2005: Alicia Basinger
Shiver and Craze
In her first solo museum exhibition, Alicia Basinger —the seventh
artist in the Wendy L. Moore Emerging Artist Series recognizing women
artists under 30 and from Northeast Ohio–creates works that
are a synthesis of media including clay, porcelain, steel and various
aggregate materials.
These sculptural works, most of which have been created specifically
for Shiver and Craze, are notable for their richly tactile surface
textures, invite a dialogue between sight and touch and suggest the
tenuous and sometimes volatile relationship between man and nature.
Each of the 27 works in Shiver and Craze is a unique hybridization
of recognizable and eccentric forms. Fuzzy, spiked, supple, fleshy,
mottled, fibrous, papery and velvety, the sculptures’ surfaces
evoke conceptual themes of growth, change, decay and memory.
Alicia Basinger: Shiver and Craze is curated by Emily Hall Tremaine
Curatorial Fellow Megan Lykins. Describing Basinger’s work,
Lykins says, “[they are] a visual and tactile feast, an assortment
of tender and crude surfaces that beckon the viewer to, as the title
suggests, “shiver and craze” over their topographies,
to re-experience the sensation of touch and the paradox of nature’s
unchangeable permutations.”
Unlike most ceramists, who try to prevent kiln “failures”
like cracking, Basinger embraces imperfection, using the fire’s
unpredictability to her advantage. She purposely combines materials
that interact vigorously and unpredictably within the kiln to produce
peculiar growths and blemishes, deliberately generating glaze faults
like shivering (excessively compressed glaze that results in chipping,
hardening or cracking) and crazing (stretched glaze resulting in a
crackled surface) in order to intensify the visual richness of her
pieces. Basinger experiments with her process, finding ways to exploit
the anomalies of the materials she uses and pushing the boundaries
of her medium.
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About the Artist
Alicia Basinger earned a BFA in Ceramics with an emphasis on Fiber,
Photography and Enameling and a minor in Glass from the Cleveland
Institute of Art in 2004. As an undergraduate, Basinger participated
in a study abroad program at the University of Wales Institute,
Cardiff and a drawing workshop in Caylus, France. She is the recipient
of Third Agnes Gund Traveling Award, the Viktor Schrekengost Endowment
Fund for Excellence in Ceramics and the Charles Mosgo Ceramics Prize,
among numerous other awards.
Past WLM Recipients
Olga Ziemska (2007)
Sarah Kabot (2006)
Alicia Basinger (2005)
Carmen Ruiz-Davila (2004)
Angela White (2003)
Lori Kella (2002)
Tara Giannini (2001)
Christa Donner (2000)
Wendy L. Moore (1999)
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