Tim Foss
Tim Foss is a unique ceramic artist amid the Seattle art community. Exhibiting in this area for just five years, he has already become well known for both his sense of humor and his willingness to work with challenging subjects. Always skirting the line between what is decorative and what is conceptual, he demonstrates that there is just as much craft in art as there is art in craft.
Foss is the recent recipient of the Poncho Recognition Award through the Seattle Art Museum. He has received grants from 4Culture and Artist Trust. He is an instructor of wheel-throwing at Seward Park Art Studios and more of his work and a list of upcoming events can be found on his website at www.timothyfoss.com.
Artist's Statement
The accident, thanks to archaeology, which spins the ancient potter as an unlikely historian, motivates me to create a type of ceramic art that is an honest testimony to the 21st century. Right now, I look at a lot of pop surrealist artists such as Lisa Yuskavage or anime artists like Takashi Murakami who have found a way of expressing great depth in their narrative style, while still clearly indulging in the medium for its love of line and caricature. Print design or graffiti artists keep me updated to current trends in color, composition, and general societal pressure points. But I still love the realism of a Caravaggio or masterful patterning found in Samurai textile decoration or Navajo pottery.
I am very interested in abstract modernist sculpture like Noguchi’s for its quiet grace and its ability to subconsciously trigger an emotional reaction. It also allows plenty of blank surfaces for staining and etching a piece. When I work, I am searching for a voice that can describe where I fit into society: How much am I the conqueror? How much the conquered? How much of my daily mythology is nature-based? How much technological? I have studied both pottery and painting, and though I combined them for a while, I’m beginning to save my illustrations for sculpture and rely only on form and color in my functional work.
Making ceramic art is like working with flesh that becomes bone. It enlists every element: earth, water, fire, and air to become what I ask of it. It awakens all the ancestry of useful vessels or rejects hollowness and is solid, impenetrable stone. It is a strenuous medium to work with as it dries, or when the piece is sizable, but as it often dances around my designs I find myself following it into its final position. The resulting surface hides from me until it is fired, and with the opening of the kiln I meet a piece for the first time. That introduction is inspiring.
The accident, thanks to archaeology, which spins the ancient potter as an unlikely historian, motivates me to create a type of ceramic art that is an honest testimony to the 21st century. Right now, I look at a lot of pop surrealist artists such as Lisa Yuskavage or anime artists like Takashi Murakami who have found a way of expressing great depth in their narrative style, while still clearly indulging in the medium for its love of line and caricature. Print design or graffiti artists keep me updated to current trends in color, composition, and general societal pressure points. But I still love the realism of a Caravaggio or masterful patterning found in Samurai textile decoration or Navajo pottery.
I am very interested in abstract modernist sculpture like Noguchi’s for its quiet grace and its ability to subconsciously trigger an emotional reaction. It also allows plenty of blank surfaces for staining and etching a piece. When I work, I am searching for a voice that can describe where I fit into society: How much am I the conqueror? How much the conquered? How much of my daily mythology is nature-based? How much technological? I have studied both pottery and painting, and though I combined them for a while, I’m beginning to save my illustrations for sculpture and rely only on form and color in my functional work.
Making ceramic art is like working with flesh that becomes bone. It enlists every element: earth, water, fire, and air to become what I ask of it. It awakens all the ancestry of useful vessels or rejects hollowness and is solid, impenetrable stone. It is a strenuous medium to work with as it dries, or when the piece is sizable, but as it often dances around my designs I find myself following it into its final position. The resulting surface hides from me until it is fired, and with the opening of the kiln I meet a piece for the first time. That introduction is inspiring.