Alison Kudlow

BIO

Alison Kudlow (b. 1981) lives and works in Brooklyn. She earned a BA from the University of Southern California, a post-baccalaureate degree from Brandeis University and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Studio Art. She has shown at numerous galleries including Field Projects, Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Flux Factory, UrbanGlass, Deanna Evans Projects, Doppelgänger Projects, Paradice Palase, Underdonk, Wavelength Space, and at Fullerton College in California. She presented a solo show, Meaningful Rituals in Irrational Times, at Elijah Wheat Showroom’s Brooklyn location in 2019. She was an invited resident at the Art Ichol Center in Maihar, Madhya Pradesh, India in January 2023.

ARTIST STATEMENT

I capture glass in mid-motion, resulting in works best described with verbs. With glass pooling, oozing, and bulging from ceramic forms, each sculpture feels precarious, like a moment that cannot last.

I develop kiln programs to heat the glass until it is viscous and then quickly drop the temperature to pause the drips, giving my materials agency to embody heat, gravity, and time. My sculptures, arrested in motion, reflect a refusal to accept impermanence. The work is a response to grief, both personal and environmental. As if moving too slowly to perceive, they imply a glacial pace, challenging anthropocentric notions of time. ]

I explore the slipperiness of categories, producing bodily ceramic sculptures that simultaneously resemble fruits, geodes, and undersea creatures. I complicate their seemingly organic form and fragile materiality with metal interventions that reference the built environment. The sculptures suggest a fuzziness between human and human-made, plant and mineral, troubling categorization and connoting infinite fluid possibilities.

Interview with Alison Kudlow

Can you tell us a bit about your background and how you became interested in becoming an artist?

I’ve been into making art for as long as I can remember, but as a kid I don’t think I understood that a person could grow up and be an artist. Or I didn’t know what that would mean or look like. And of course in our culture people tend to define themselves by how they make money, so declaring oneself an artist—something that inevitably needs to happen long before money is being made—is a bit on an act of rebellion. I started that in my mid twenties. The meaning of being an artist has expanded for me over time. Now it’s some combination of what I do in my studio and of being a member of a community.

How do you maintain momentum in your practice?

I honestly don’t struggle with this. I always have more ideas of what to make than I have time to make them. Then when I am making inevitably more ideas come to me. Making begets making and the inertia that builds up over time is quite over-powering. I have a hard time taking a break.

What medium/media are you working in right now? What draws you to this particular material or method?

I’ve been working primarily in ceramics and glass for the past five years. I fell in love with both materials because of their ability to embody the forces that form them—time, heat, gravity. Clay is so infinitely malleable before it’s fired and then, once vitrified is such a detailed document of everything that happened to it before. Glass, as an amorphous solid, can become any level of viscous with the right amount of heat, so it’s a perfect material for capturing motion. In order to accomplish what I wanted, I needed to learn about them very deeply. I had to do so much material research and that basically became my practice for awhile. I think I’ll always be learning from my materials and that ceramic and glass will be an important part of my language for a long time, but I’m excited to have reached a point where I’m pulling other materials back into the mix.

Can you walk us through your overall process in making your current work? Does drawing play a role in your process?

I usually begin with a rough sketch before I start building in clay. The sketch helps me arrive at the general form and to think through how the piece will hang or stand up, whether or not I’ll need to build it modularly, and approximately what size each part should be. But I keep it rough because I like to leave a lot of room for decisions to happen once I’m building it. While devising the forms I source or design their associated metal hardware, accounting for the shrinkage of the clay.

I work with a heavily grogged clay and build with a lot of slabs and some coils. Once the piece is dry I bisque fire it. Then I add glazes, though I tend to keep these minimal. I want my materials to get to be themselves so I don’t like to add a lot of surface that would conceal the clay.

After the glaze firing, I add glass to the pieces. I place frit and cut pieces of sheet onto the clay forms and then put them back in the kiln. I suspend the pieces above the kiln floor on hand-built structures which allows space for the glass to ooze downward with gravity. I’ve developed custom kiln schedules to heat the glass to my desired levels of viscosity. By varying the peak temperature, the rate at which the kiln heats, and the duration at each temperature, I can provoke different outcomes, ranging from calm pools to frothing bulges. By lowering the temperature quickly, I stop the glass in motion. Then I cool the kiln slowly to avoid structural cracking. In successive firings I layer on more glass or change the orientation of the piece, complicating their visible histories.

Can you talk about some of the ongoing interests, imagery, and concepts that have informed your process and body of work over time? How do you anticipate your work progressing in the future?

A few years ago I was dealing with a lot of grief and so was doing a lot of thinking and reading and writing about time. I wanted to change my relationship with time and my practice became an investigation into how I could do that materially. I captured materials in motion as a means of stopping time. I’m still embodying time in my materials but my vocabulary has also expanded.

For the past few years I’ve been interested in creating forms that defy categorization. I create objects that are specific and familiar but difficult to name—they tend to appear to be simultaneously bodily, botanical, and mineral. I am proposing a fluid ecology of infinite spectral possibilities.

Have you had any epiphanies recently that have changed the course of your work or caused you to shift directions?

I had a baby in 2020 and the experience of pregnancy, birthing, and lactation had a dramatic, though inadvertent, impact on my work. Seeing my body transform so completely, the surreal experience of growing a body inside mine, watching my breasts, which I’d carried around for forty years while they did nothing, suddenly become one of the most active and maintenance-requiring organs of my body was so exciting and troubling and strange. As a sculptor, my work is so deeply rooted in how it relates to bodies—mine and those who encounter my objects—so seeing my body suddenly become so plastic marked a deep shift in perspective. I didn’t set out to express this change in my work, but now, looking back on what I’ve made over these past two years its almost humorously obvious how much of that experience is reflected in my work.

I create my forms intuitively, based on a trust that whatever I’m thinking or reading about, whatever concepts I’m exploring will reveal themselves in the work. Inevitably there’s other seepage of my inner world into the work. Since the pandemic, I’ve started having my weekly therapy sessions from my studio. My therapist is watching literal materializations of my inner being form in the background of our visits and through those conversations its become apparent that my work is deeply psychological. There was a time when I would’ve been afraid to admit that, but now I look at the history of sculptors, particularly women and particularly surrealists, and the psychological elements of their work was always right out there for all to see. So I guess my epiphany is that I now own the psychological as part of my artistic lineage.

Who are some contemporary artists you’re excited about? What are the best exhibitions you’ve seen in recent memory and why do they stand out?

Last week I saw Wangechi Mutu’s show at the New Museum. Her forms and the way she uses materials are so powerful. She is creating her own worlds of hybridity and decolonization in a truly singular way. I also saw Hannah Levy’s most recent show at Casey Kaplan. The amount of tension she can build into her forms is astonishing and the precision of her metal work is unparalleled. I’m also head over heels in love with my friend Alicia Adamerovich’s work. She just had a show at Kohn Gallery in Los Angeles that was a combination of otherworldly paintings and enchantingly odd sculptures. She’s delving deeply into psychological spaces to develop a unique and resounding voice. I feel lucky to get to exchange studio visits with her regularly.

Do you have any tips or advice that someone has shared with you that you have found particularly helpful?

Amy Sillman was the commencement speaker for my MFA program. In her talk she advised us to “disappear for ten years” and work on developing our craft and building our community. She assured us that if we focused on craft and community, there would be a seat at the table for each of us. I think about those words a lot and they’ve become a sort of motto to me. I’m not naive enough to believe that the art world is a meritocracy or that there’s any guarantee that hard work will be rewarded, but I do believe that focusing on the strength of the work and being an engaged member of a community of artists are in of themselves the most meaningful pursuits.

What are you working on in the studio right now? What’s coming up next for you?

I’m about to start making a group of wall-works for a show in 2024. Considering how a piece will interact with the wall is such a fun and challenging prompt. Will they be autonomous objects that are taxidermied to the wall, will they be forms that emerge from the wall, or will they interact with or even penetrate the wall? I’m starting with a lot of quick sketches in my notebook to capture a range of approaches.

To find out more about Alison Kudlow check out her Instagram and website.