Elizabeth Donsbach

I came to work with clay after a lifetime love of dirt and rocks and wild landscapes, so clay feels like a natural friend. Clay has so many virtues. It is broad and open minded in its interests; imaginative and sensual in its play. Its structure possesses integrity and a complex intelligence. It is pliant but not easy.

At the other horizon, I love the clean and elegantly emotional lines of classical and Renaissance sculpture; but I have never been able to do that kind of work. Whenever I look at and try to represent the life and bodies around me, all I can see is complexity and paradox, intricate and contradictory relationships, and the delicate emotional ambiguities where these beings touch. The world of life is lush and weird, and the layered depths of it are infinite. I don’t know how to depict that vision literally, so I lay it down in tangled imagery that points to the feelings it evokes.

My process is to work with the clay, offering it a form, offering the images that come into my mind; but mostly listening and watching for the moment when the clay speaks back in its rich voice, and stories sprout in its soil.