Ellen Robinson

March 24 – May 19, 2017

Greenwich House Pottery is pleased to announce Ellen Robinson as our current Fellow. Ellen is a New York based artist who has been working in clay since graduate school at SVA. Her approach to clay is intuitive but not to say stream of consciousness. Her three-dimensional forms are more like receptacles for thoughts than some form of expressionist sculpture. Her pieces are sublime organic gardens – nature overtaking some forgotten object or piece of detritus, like lichen upon a stone, or coral on the sea bed. Each piece, though different in scale and arrangement, all contain an essential sense of themselves, organisms breathing new life into an inanimate object.

“The work is meant to suggest interior landscapes, archaic fragments or trash from outer space. Flat-footed forms constructed with slabs and coils are covered in an accumulation of decorative detritus. The pieces are made in low-fire ceramics, with monochromatic black or white glaze, which obscures the forms, creating a kind of mutability. The black addresses what is hidden and hard to describe — a visible trace of an invisible thing. The white is lightness and feathery turning, subtracting the weight of the murky dark.”

Ellen Robinson lives and works in the Bushwick area of Brooklyn. She received her undergraduate degree from Sarah Lawrence and an M.F.A. from the School of Visual Arts, where she began working in ceramics. She has been an artist-in-residence at the Henry Street Settlement and has shown her work at galleries such as Alona Kagan Gallery, One Main Street Gallery and Diamantina Gallery. She is currently the Director of Press and Publications at Cheim & Read, where she has edited numerous catalogues and books, including Louise Bourgeois: Suspension, Jenny Holzer: Dust Paintings and Danto on Scully.