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Artist from the LICHTFARBEN, WHEELS OFF - HANDS ON, PATTERNS exhibit
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STATEMENT

Edda Blume

My academic background is as a historian.  Later, while I was working as a full-time mother I took photography, drawing and painting classes at the University of California in San Diego and at the University of Iowa.  About six years ago, after moving to Pittsburgh from Iowa City, I started bead weaving and bead embroidery, which is strongly influenced by my background in photography and painting.  I use pictorial elements and symbols, but I also try to tell a story in my abstract work.  Often a piece starts out figuratively and gets condensed during the work process into elements of color and shape.  Beadwork forces me to use these elements to convey content.

The neckpieces are based on art, folktales and literature.  Sometimes I use my own paintings or photographs like in “Por Ninguna Parte”.  “The Shroud” is based on a fairytale by the Grimm brothers about a mother who could not cease crying after the death of her child.  Finally the child appeared in her dreams and comforted her, so that both of them could rest in peace.  “The Sinking Moon Has Left the Sky…” is based on a fragment by the Greek poet Sappho (born around 620 BCE – died around 570 BCE): 

“The sinking moon has left the sky,

The Pleiades have also gone.

Midnight comes – and goes, the hours fly

And solitary still, I lie.”

(transl. by Edwin Marion Cox) 

While Sappho was as famous as Homer her work was suppressed during the early Middle Ages and exists now only in fragments.  “When Sappho disappeared from Medieval Europe, more was lost than a few hundred pages of exquisite poetry.  It was part of something associated with the development of free thought-processes, whether in poetry or astronomy or mathematics, and it took the world a long and painful fight to recover the openness which the old Hellenic world had assumed to be its natural arena for thought.”

(Harris, William, Sappho, The Greek Poems).

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Jane Freund

Jane Freund has been working in ceramics for more than 30 years, first as a potter making functional wheel-thrown pieces and, in the past five years, primarily with hand-built forms. 

Jane often combines clay with materials such as broken china shards, glass from the Monongahela River, handmade beads, metal, bolts, nails and other recycled parts.  Her non-functional pieces are either raku fired or pit fired outdoors in a sawdust-filled kiln to create a primitive, smoked effect.

A resident of Forest Hills, Pa., Jane makes pots in a ceramics co-op at the Firehouse Studios on Pittsburgh’s Northside. She has taught a hand-building class (“Hands On!”) at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts and is a member of the Associated Artists of Pittsburgh and the Craftsmen’s Guild of Pittsburgh.  Jane also works as a freelance photographer and writer.

Why pinch pots?

Jane first caught the “pinching bug” at workshops with Jimmy Clark and Paulus Berensohn, whose book “Finding One’s Way With Clay” has been an inspiration.

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Ruth E. Levine

pattern, n. paragon, model, standard, stereotype, ideal,

                 archetype  (COPY, BEGINNING, PERFECTION);

repetition, n. reiteration, …; restatement, recapitulation,

                     paraphrase, …; recurrence,  reappearance,

                     encore, return, perserveration, periodicity, rhythm;

echo, n. reverberation, repercussion, rebound, replication,

             re-echo, reflection, reply;

shift, n. transference, change, translocation (TRANSFER);…

shift, v. turn, veer, tack, swerve, deviate (CHANGE); change,

             transpose, displace (TRANSFER);…

Roget’s Thesaurus 

REBOUND

RESOUND

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