Erin Conyers
April 16, 2021.
Erin Conyers is a ceramic and mixed media artist based in Kansas City, Missouri. She received her BFA in ceramics at The Kansas City Art Institute in 2019. She enjoys working intuitively with clay, building sculptural vessels that describe different emotions or beliefs that are often not talked about. For her, building with clay has always been a way to understand her feelings when they haven’t been processed or even identified yet. Most of her works have been about trying to find balance within the imbalances life throws at us or finding growth through constant movement.
Working with ceramic materials and mixed media, Erin focuses on environmental issues, capturing the effects of people’s relationships, living and existing within our environment. Erin is also incredibly passionate about pursuing a completely sustainable and waste-free lifestyle as well as community activism and organization. She recreates objects of contemporary conveniences like plastic, single-use water bottles and modern medical packaging. She emulates industrial processes, such as mold making, that are used to mass-produce cheap goods, allowing her to create individual replications of objects. She fills these molds with ceramic materials from studio excess and waste.
However, the vessels she made in Iceland were about finding growth through prolonged periods of stillness. In Iceland, she took a minimalist approach, something she had never done before. She noticed how everything around her was so huge, complex and vast, yet simultaneously so simple and easy. She didn’t want to make anything that took away from the wonderland spirit of the island and chose to make a series that would fit into the landscape and become a part of it. What came from her time living in Iceland was a series of vessels called Breathing Vessels. The solitude of living in a secluded fjord in Iceland gave her the opportunity to focus inwards and create work about the simple yet complex motions of moving the breath through the body. Thank you, Erin!
// More of Erin’s work //
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