Biography

I am drawn to ancient buildings and to the sites shaped by those who came before us, whose imprints remain across the centuries and link us together. When I travel, I trace those links by pressing wet clay against walls, floors, furniture, doorknobs, eroded fragments of statuary, and cemetery sculptures. These impressions are small witnesses, easily worn away by time and unlikely to enter anyone’s focus. I use these molds in fragmented and distorted ways.

My work is filled with symbols and remnants. Ancient worship. Sacred and secular texts. Gallo Roman imagery, both playful and sincere. Medieval marks. The hands, faces, and feet of Renaissance royalty, Viking warriors, and monks. These tailings become the language my pieces speak. I use them with gratitude, and at times with hesitation. My intention is to honor the forgotten artists who made them.

When I attach impressions from a clay cylinder created more than five thousand years ago in the cradle of civilization to a bowl I make today in America using porcelain mined in Europe, and perhaps textured with a basket woven two generations ago on yet another continent, I feel suspended between makers. I reach across time to connect them.

STATEMENT

Inge Roberts works with a range of porcelain bodies and has adapted Philip Cornelius’ thin slab method to suit the needs of her hand built forms. She incorporates appropriated elements drawn from a collection she has assembled over the past thirty years, integrating these forms into her work in ways that build on both tradition and experimentation.