Clay Art Center is proud to present CLAY DREAMS, a solo exhibition featuring evocative figurative sculpture exploring the human condition by internationally renowned Michigan artist Mark Chatterley. The exhibit will run from April 9 – May 7, 2011 with an opening reception April 9 from 6-8pm. Admission to the gallery and the SHOP at CAC, featuring one-of-a kind handmade pottery and sculpture, is free. Mark will also be leading a two-day weekend workshop, entitled Using the Golden Mean: A Figurative Sculpture with Mark Chatterley, April 9-10, 2011. For more information and to register, visit www.clayartcenter.org.
Cryptic figures allure, unnerve and engage the viewer as they dance, embrace and gaze expressionless into the other's eyes. Chatterley's hand-built, ceramic creations appear to be our counterparts from another time…another world, but distinctly familiar. The Michigan native has received over twenty awards from both national and international exhibitions including the Fletcher Challenge Ceramics Award in Auckland, New Zealand, the Taiwan Golden Ceramics Award in Taipei and he was a participant in the JINRO International Ceramic Art (JICA) Workshop Invitational at the Hong-ik Ceramic Research Institute in Seoul, Korea.
About his work, Chatterley states, "My work is about traveling in the dream world. The place that exists between wakefulness and sleep. Betwixt and between. I am interested in conscious thoughts and the space between thoughts. My work allows me to get to these spots. I try to make pieces that are timeless yet contemporary. As if the sculpture was dug up from a civilization yet to exist."
“…Everything is either moving toward or away from nothingness. Life, death, creation and destruction - this is the world I find myself in. I want my art to echo these thoughts, everything in a state of flux, changing and reforming. A sense of decay along with life. Nothing is permanent and nothing stays the same. I also try to show thoughts and feelings of the human condition. Beauty in the malformed, acceptance of the inevitable. I am doing work of our time for our time, even though I look to the past, the dead for inspiration.”
Mark Chatterley creates larger-than-life ceramic figures with lava-like glazes. Seeming to have emerged from the earth's crust, the creations of a fire god millions of years ago, his sculpture possesses a primordial presence that transcends time and geography. One might expect to find a silent grouping of his work on a South Pacific island, in an African savanna, or perhaps atop an Irish knoll. The figures are not "pretty," and they sometimes have an edge of intensity, not unlike Magdalena Abakanowicz' works. Yet, their power is expressed through an astonishing, primitive grace. After building a kiln to accommodate his seven-foot tall, one-piece, free-standing figures, he set himself free to explore "the archetypal images that go beyond culture and time that Jung wrote about." 
