Walter McConnell: Itinerant Edens

February 9 - April 6, 2008 Free Admission

Walter McConnell was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1956. He received his BFA from the University of Connecticut in 1974 and his MFA in Ceramic Art from Alfred University in 1986. He’s the recipient of individual artists’ grants from the New York Foundation of the Arts and the Constance Saltonstall Foundation and residency grants from The European Ceramic Work Center, The Bemis Foundation, the JM Kohler Art Industry Program. Recent exhibitions include; Cross-McKenzie Ceramic Art, Sweden; Museum Het Kruithuis, Netherlands; the Yingge Ceramics Museum, Taipei, Taiwan. Essays and reviews of McConnell’s work have appeared in World Sculpture news, The New Art Examiner, Ceramics: Art and Perception, The New York Times, and Ceramics Monthly. Academic appointments include: The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Connecticut. Walter McConnell is Associate Professor of Ceramic Art at the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University, a position he has held since 1997.

McConnell will fill Goddard Gallery space with two major pieces. One is a fired, stacked piece made from clay that was created from molds taken of 20th century figurines. He casts these diverse objects, fires them, and then assembles them into giant stacks. The second piece will be constructed on site utilizing molded greenware objects that are unfired and still wet. This large assembly, about 10 feet high, is then contained by a plastic surround that creates a micro environment from the moisture in the molded figures. As time passes over the course of the exhibition, the molded figures begin to be dissolved by the humidity collected on the plastic as it drips like rain onto the figures that represent “the actual cycle of life and decay inherent to biological systems.”