Insights Lecture: Kate Blacklock

at the Blackstone Valley Visitor's Center Theatre

Thursday, 01/12/2012 – 7:00 PM

Kate Blacklock received her undergraduate degree from University if California at Santa Cruz ('79) and her MFA ('87), in Ceramics from RISD. She has taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Rhode Island College and for nine years co-chaired the Ceramics Department at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, where she was Associate Professor. She has been teaching in the Industrial Design Department at RISD since 2002.

Kate will be giving a visual and oral presentation: "I look back over my work of the last thirty years and wonder if an outside eye might view this collection of objects as the work of five or six artists rather than one. They might ask themselves, what connects these separate bodies of work? Is this the work of a painter? A sculptor? A photographer? Yet when I look, I see a very linear progression. An exploration of a limited number of themes or ideas examining how we are viewed by others in contrast to how we view ourselves. As my personal experience of this has changed over the years, so have the visual manifestations. From earlier thoughts about sexual objectification to more current ideas about fading sexuality and beauty, portrayed in clay vessels and porcelain busts, combinations of painting and clay and most recently direct object scans printed on aluminum. Throughout, there are recurring images of flowers and vegetation as metaphors for sexuality; of classical and decorative objects serving as signifiers of beauty; of hands holding on to precious or fragile objects, holding on or moving through time."