Sculptor Julia Kunin creates baroquely grotesque animal forms, such as Double Portrait, 2010.
Kunin, a video artist and sculptor of intricate, lustrously glazed, baroquely grotesque animal forms, says she always looked to the decorative arts for inspiration. She is currently researching Art Nouveau pottery as well as work created in socialist Hungary and elsewhere in Eastern Europe, viewing the region’s history, esthetics, and politics through its ceramic works, and has spent the past five years studying iridescent glazes in Hungary.
“Clay,” she says, “gives me the freedom to create something intense, raw, over the top. It has allowed me to pile things up, break things down, play, and make mistakes.” Kunin loves the immediacy of a material that is “as basic as mud,” she points out. “I am addicted to the unpredictability and iridescence of the glazes I’m using as well as the range of their colors and their psychedelic qualities.”
Kunin grew up in Vermont in the ‘70s, when the studio-potter movement was in full bloom. Later, she says, she rejected clay as a dull brown “craft” material but returned to it in 2003. She started exploring female sexuality and the body and began using octopuses for more metaphorical imagery. Frustrated by a series in cast glass, “I happened on an exhibit by the Chinese artist Ah Xain, who creates busts painted in traditional Chinese porcelain patterns from Jingdezhen, China. That initial spark of an idea has kept me going now for ten years.”
