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Winter Resident Profile - Elaine McHard - 2009 Winter Resident Intern www.elainemchard.com 
I am very inspired by the immediate history of my own culture. More specifically, I am talking about Victorian culture, especially its silverware. I can still remember sitting down for dinner at Christmas to my grandmother’s table of ornate silverware. Although this is a ritual we no longer practice it is still vivid in my childhood memory, and I find myself fascinated with silver dining sets complete with relief-sculpted soup terrine and serving dishes. I love the way the sculptures on the dishes tell the story of the food about to be eaten. Images of the hunt are portrayed on the tops of lids in all their gruesome glory. My medium is ceramic, and I choose this for the love of the process of working with clay. It gives me an opportunity to work intimately with the images that I am sculpting. I enjoy the challenge of having an inspiration from another material. As I work I look at images of silver and try to make them come alive in clay. Sometimes I throw these forms and sometimes I use molds of silver pieces. In each case, the use of clay and glaze provides me with a finished product that would never come from working with silver. Yet, at the same time it references silver from a particular time period through form and design. I revel in the idea that I am acknowledging the past generations of my family and reinterpreting it into something that is communicating with the artistic dialogue of my time. 
My goal is always to come up with work that tells its own story. Dying cultures may loose their language, but some of the last things to go are their stories, because they are repeatedly told to children. Having these stories at the dinner table offers an unspoken communication; a way of relating to each other on a deeper level that does not necessarily have to come across in verbal communication. |