Candy Depew

Artist-in-Residency program at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center to create a porcelain font project for candycoated.org webzine and to acquire industry-inspired ceramic techniques to supplement the creation of a new body of work. Support for materials and related shipping costs.

I come from a large family of nine. My mother had a consuming passion that drove her to amass a vast collection of antiques. Her massive inventory filled the home in which we lived. The walls of nearly every room were lined with glass cabinets filled with examples of early American cut glass and European porcelains. These cabinets housed, protected and categorically displayed the prized examples of her obsession and desire. My exposure every day for 17 years to the cabinets provided me with a heightened visual vocabulary for understanding pattern, style and design, as well as arrangements of form and of surface.

My mother's urge to collect and to decorate the domestic environment with her collections is the driving force behind the sculpture that I make. My sculptural ceramic installations investigate the environments and places created by and for collections, and represents my personal interest in the decorative arts, ornament- ation, the organization of interior space and the history of design. I have become aware of not only the subtle relationships among the decorative, design and the fine arts, but the potential for combining these genres in "room installations." I think of these rooms as "virtual tableaux" which require the viewer to be within, and part of, the space.