Autumn Horwath (Dousman, WI) is a sculptor building connections between our perception of space and time in relation to the body. Horwath earned a BFA in Art Education from Belmont University in Nashville, TN, was an Educational Fellow at the Archie Bray Foundation for the Ceramic Arts in Helena, MT, and did graduate studies in Architecture and Sculpture at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She is currently a MFA Candidate at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
I create art as an embodied act that quiets the mind. Imprints are reminders of our shared experiences of mortality. Through human-scale ceramic forms, I seek to connect bodily events across space and time. Each story is at once a fragment and a whole, even more so, a whole within a whole.
The curved bottoms of these tall forms resist fixity, never static– ambiguous monuments teetering between realms and times. Boundaries are blurred from one context to the next across time, here conveyed by the lightness of translucent paper stacked and hung to sway, further softening the solidity of these sculptures. Their tapered forms bend to meet at sharp edges like a hand-carved tool. The body itself is a tool that moves through space, shaping places. It is also a tool that can create life, carving past spirit into new life.
Holes at various heights connect front and back, interior and exterior, becoming a place within a space. These openings correspond to the height of my own body: heart, eyes, torso, hands, and in perhaps most critically the navel. This passage point sustains maternal lineages that extend beyond my own memories, thus becoming a transmitter of a story beyond a single lifetime.
Holes are frames to look through, focusing yet altering our perception. While holes in Western society carry a negative connotation, something lost or lacking, in Eastern belief systems nothing becomes an Emptiness that opens to vast potentiality. I consider how the holes or voids in my objects are spaces undefined or overlooked. They can be as telling as the structures themselves. These gaps reveal a vulnerability that allows us to tap into the many lives we each live within one body, the many places that can inhabit one space. I seek to make work in the fullness in which we exist, where the layering of thoughts and events fuse to become our perception of time. My fingerprints left in the clay will remain past my body’s decomposition, becoming yet another layer in our perception of space and time.