The artist calls her intimately scaled biomorphic ceramic forms “emotional self-portraits.” Kathy Butterly pushes the limits of her medium to create alluring and discomfiting vessels, sometimes firing the same work thirty or forty times to achieve her desired effect. In this work, she engages the innate personalities of materials, glazes, and shapes, exploring the relationship between feeling and form. Her metamorphosing sculptures incorporate fleshly and bodily folds, invoke gendered iconographies in their curves and scale, and sometimes include adornment in the form of small pearlescent beads.

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