Janis Mars Wunderlich Workshop
Imaginative Figures in Clay - 2009
Janis Mars Wunderlich teaches this fast-paced three day, hands-on sculpture workshop focusing on expressive figurative sculpture. Participants will learn a multitude of techniques for hand building sculptures, adding texture, and glazing techniques. Janis will help participants develop intricately layered surfaces, while discussing personal imagery and translating the struggles and joys of everyday life into figurative form.
Workshop content will go beyond the technicalities of making, as Janis shares an abundance of ideas about studio set-up, working with galleries, exhibiting and selling work, and other practical advice from her experiences as a busy artist and mother. Participants will gain an appreciation for how Janis's life experiences shape her artwork, while learning to interpret the events that surround them into richly detailed imaginative figures in clay.
Class size 18.
10:00 am - 5:00 pm
Janis Mars Wunderlich Bio
Born in Akron, OH in 1970, Janis Mars Wunderlich received her BFA from Brigham Young University (Provo,Utah) and an MFA from The Ohio State University (Columbus, OH). As a full-time, at-home artist and mother of five, Wunderlich has spent many years trying to balance art and family matters. Her deeply personal, narrative works capture the exhaustion and excitement of a busy family life, full of creative images, domestic duties, and nurturing responsibilities. Adapting to the frequent interruption of family duties, and with children working along her side in her studio, Wunderlich has managed to create an impressive and excessive body of work.
While older work often showed the darker struggles of parenting, her newer work focuses on the humor, intensity, and intricacy of family life. A recipient of several honors and grants, her work has been in hundreds of national and international exhibitions, and can be seen nationally and internationally in public and private collections. In any spare time she finds, she lectures and conducts workshops at several universities and art centers in the U.S. and Canada.
Janis Mars Wunderlich Artist Statement
As a busy creative artist and parent to several wonderfully rambunctious children, I am a grateful recipient of an unending flow of quirky, make-believe imagery. The books and tales we read, the pets that parade around us, dress up time, homework time, even dinner time with all the ensuing chaos- every moment of my day brings another situation which my mind churns into images. But coupled with that instantaneous inspiration is a continuous, unending flow of daunting housework, crusty laundry, piles of dishes, domestic overload, wrestling matches and squirmishes, and edgy, independent teenage attitude!
This fantastic dichotomy of family life frustrates and fascinates me, and I use my artwork as a way to process all of the beautiful and frenzied contrasts that make up my day. In an attempt to balance studio time with all the domestic issues and family needs, I literally integrate studio/sculpture time into my routine all day long. It is not uncommon for me to be making dinner, working on a sculpture, and telling a story to my kids at the same time to keep them entertained. So it should come as no surprise that there are a lot of juggling, balancing, writhing creatures with complicated surfaces!
I have come to realize that the core of my individual identity is wrapped up in my family. The mothering, nurturing, and protective instincts within me are so inherent that I tend to playfully blend human imagery into animalistic imagery in my mind. The intricate surfaces of my ceramic mother figures are laden, even dripping with kids. The figure is clearly overwhelmed and almost engulfed in the frenzy. But it is precisely this writhing, detailed layering that make the figures so delicate and deliciously intriguing. The surfaces almost literally crawl with life as they celebrate the challenges and rewards of family life.
