Images Transformed
Margaret Realica
September 04 to November 26, 2010
Realica's intriguing sculptural works evolve through the processes of deconstruction and reconstruction, with a continued emphasis on opposing organic materials with the mechanical. Her work strives to merge and integrate the two into a single cohesive form.
Bio
Originally from the United Kingdom, Margaret Realica attended Leicester School of Art. She then worked as a teacher of ceramics and an exhibiting artist for many years in Hawaii. Returning to the UK, she taught ceramics at Warwick University for several years before relocating to the Bay Area in Northern California where she now lives and works. Her mixed-media sculpture has been exhibited extensively in the United States and she was a guest artist with NCECA in Portland in 2006. International exhibitions have included Canada and Italy, and Realica’s work has also been featured in numerous publications, including Peter Lane’s Studio Porcelain and Contemporary Porcelain, Robin Hopper’s Ceramics Spectrum and Garth Clark’s Artful Teapot, which also included a four-year traveling exhibition. Her work is also represented in the permanent collections of the Hawaii State Foundation on Culture and the Arts Museum and the Contemporary Museum FHB, in Honolulu, Hawaii; The Internazionale delle Museum in Faenza, Italy and Mesa Contemporary Arts in Mesa, Arizona.
www.mrealica.com/mrealica
Essay
My work has chiefly been influenced by a combination of living and working in different geographic locations, and by my heritage and experiences. From these experiences I have observed and been attracted to the stark and opposing contrasts of the ancient and the contemporary. Subjects range from the organic and the mechanical to the visual play between the bleak and the brilliant. These dichotomies have become the central subject matter of my work - seeing the material interactions between them, how one affects and transforms the other.
My method of working includes playing with deconstruction and reconstruction, the layering of images, wheel-thrown and altered porcelain, found gears which are refinished, electronics or machine parts and transparencies with drawings on 35mm film.
- Margaret Realica, 2010
