Chadima Gallery Exhibitions

Artist: Sara D. Simonson

Artist’s Reception Date:  Thursday, April 2nd

Time: 5:30-7:30 pm with Artist Remarks at 6pm

In the Gallery: March 31st–April 26th

Show Description: to be added

Artist Bio:  After a 26-year career teaching literacy in the Department of Curriculum & Instruction at Western Illinois University, where she served as both professor and department chair, Sara Simonson was named Professor Emeritus in 2016. In retirement, she discovered a joyful passion for working with clay.

Sara’s ceramic work is playful, whimsical, and driven by curiosity about form rather than function. Working in both earthenware and stoneware, she creates sculptural pieces that invite viewers to explore texture, pattern, and movement. In addition to ceramics, she also creates jewelry and sculptural forms in metal, primarily sterling silver.

Since she began exhibiting in 2018, her work has been included in numerous national and international juried exhibitions, earning awards such as Best of Show at the Honeywell Annual Fine Art National Juried Exhibition and recognition at the Arts North International Juried Exhibition. Her ceramic tessellation series was also featured in an exhibition at the Quad Cities International Airport.

She lives and works in Macomb, Illinois, where much of her work begins at her kitchen counter or in her garage studio. Currently, she and her partner are building a backyard ceramics and metals studio as her creative practice continues to grow.

Artist Statement
Being tough, hard, and unfeeling has been the protective armor that I convey to those closest to me, hiding the overthinking, pain, and fragility in my journey through life.

Using clay, I can physically manipulate my output, revealing my intimate emotions in a piece of work. Moreover, the selected glazes expose the rough patches and my interpretations of self permanent marks that I grapple with everyday.

The clay acts as a therapeutic process to work through memories that I have pushed down and concealed from others in order to project what I have believed to be a more perfect image. The clay is pushed, pulled, formed, and attached, offering insight to the viewer my underlying truths in a visual format. Fascinated by texture, I find myself making marks in clay and/or applying glazes that communicate aspects of my self-concept.

Through repetition and layering, these abstract singular pieces and group installations embody facets of my subconscious and identity.

You can check out  more of Sara’s work at her Instagram:  sara_d_ceramics