Meet pattie chalmers | Artist and Professor

We had the good fortune of connecting with pattie chalmers and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi pattie, can you tell us more about your background and the role it’s played in shaping who you are today?
I am from Winnipeg (Winterpeg)

The winters of my life are vast: an openness that gives the sensation of being giant and tiny at the same time. It is an open flat white nothingness. To the many that flee it for
milder and more varied landscapes to the east and west, it is a ceaseless event that only gets longer with age.

Welcome to the big sky—to a blue, blinding sky. Welcome to the never-ending biting whiteness. Day occurs in short bursts, framed by long nights. Black and blue always bordered a bounty of burning white.

A time of dormancy and layering ourselves, cleaving us from our physical identities. The winter freezes our breath into white clouds as it is exhaled, frosting scarves and toques, brows and eyelashes as it hangs in the air.

This is a memory of a place, event, a person, all charged with emotion. A change in the image because of a human flaw: a part is heightened, another shrinks. Presented as if on stage. A play—partly true, partly of my making. Changes in the image respond to my psychology. Truth and fiction—leading then following. The pieces begin to fit together like a dream or the rings of a circus.

What grows in winter? Stories, plans, desires, cynicism, and a decision to survive.

Can you open up a bit about your work and career? We’re big fans and we’d love for our community to learn more about your work.
My work can be separated into three main types: pottery, figures/tableaux and objects/collections. These categories, although visually distinct, are, for me, linked by a connection in each to narrative. How I think about narrative fluctuates as I move between ideas and approaches to making. But the result, whether a vessel, sculpture or installation, starts with the accumulation of ideas that ultimately suggest a story.

Pottery
The pottery I make serves as a canvas for the images and patterns I cull from sources such as four-for-a-dollar comic books, arcade video games and family photo albums. The drawings are personal but chosen for their familiar language: true loves, devoted siblings or best friends, for example. By connecting such images to functional objects, I become part of a tradition of narrative ceramic vessel makers that appeals to my interest in history and my desire to understand how we arrived at where we are now.

Figures/Tableaux
The ceramic figures I make evolved from images I carved on my pottery; when I removed them from their drawn environments and placed them next to each other, I found unplanned narratives emerged. These chance stories joined with my own experiences into semi-fictional vignettes. And as is the way with recounted stories, fragments became exaggerated and diminished. These splinters are twisted together with added imagined elements in an order that corresponds with the flux of how things are remembered: Accounts from a parent, a movie-of-the-week, or a dream may result in a portrait, a reflection of my past, or a love note to the future.

Objects/Collections
I began grouping fabricated objects into arrangements resembling something like a “cabinet of curiosity” or maybe one’s aunt’s china hutch. The specific things in these compositions give clues to a tangle of narrative possibilities, ultimately translating into stories that, for the viewer, can become simultaneously familiar and strange. Through purposeful shifts in scale, a rejection of naturalistic rendering and a disregard for the traditional hierarchy of value, I am able to coax new fictions out of haphazard bonds. I imagine this work as a poem more than a novel, with the objects functioning as conduits to memory and imagination. The connection to others through a thing’s capacity to hold a memory and our ability to condense such a variety of experiences into seemingly mundane mementos is what continues to grab my interest in this work.

I used to think of myself very definitely as a storyteller, but my certainty has waned. I imagined I had a boat, inviting the viewer to take a paddle. I get us to the middle of the water and then let them suggest a further destination. Now I understand the importance of letting go of my control of the narrative journey, but still, as always, I will provide a boat.

If you had a friend visiting you, what are some of the local spots you’d want to take them around to?
Not being from the area I would ask you where I should go. I was taken to Arches by my host KyoungHwa Oh and that was spectacular, I would recommend it, but of course, you may not consider that exactly “in your area”.

Who else deserves some credit and recognition?
“What remains” that has been on desplay at 347co gallery in Grand Juction As part of “Small Matters” The piece is specifically a portrait of my first boyfriend, Guy Noyes, who died of leukemia in his twenties. The piece represents, as the title states, what remains when we lose someone. The objects become a halo for his absence, reminders of his identity and a conduit for memory. Making this work allowed me to focus on my past, but then in presenting the piece, I found connections with others through long-forgotten objects, shared reminiscences, and the common theme of loss. I have so many people that have supported me and shown me love, but I would say that my time with Guy taught me that life can be too short and so to make the most of it.

Website: www.pattiechalmers.com

Instagram: @ladypattiechalmers