artist list

Everyday Objects Series

Artist Biography:

Virginia Scotchie is an internationally renowned ceramic artist who teaches at the University of South Carolina. She received her BA from UNC-Chapel Hill in 1977 and her MFA from New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University in 1985. Scotchie’s work has been shown in numerous galleries and museums nationally and internationally. In the fall of 2007, she returned from Taiwan, where she did a major commission for the Taipai Count Yingge Ceramics Museum. In recent years she has been an artist in residence at the University of Hawaii and Taiwan’s Tainan National University for the Arts.

Scotchie’s work has been in several South Carolina Triennials and was included in the SC State Museum 100 Years/100 Artists: Views From the 20th Century in South Carolina, a 1999 survey of 20th century South Carolina art.

Virginia Scotchie

Columbia

Virginia Scotchie's work is represented at:

if Art Gallery

About the Work:

I make work every day. In my work I am interested in the quality of the familiar thing we see every day but really don’t see because of their familiarity. Then I work at putting the objects I make together.

Making objects is a habitual activity. The objects I make are often abstractions from the intimately known things that populate my everyday world- my son’s toys, my father’s hat or an old kitchen funnel. Sometimes the objects I make come into being through the act of making. It is not always about the objects’ reference, it is also about the making. Creating objects is what I know and what I am passionate about. Through this process I begin to understand what I am seeing.

I have an obsession with spouts, handles and knobs. This probably comes from being a potter when I first worked in clay. I think it is also about wanting my work to be verb-like in its reference to the everyday.

Because I work with objects I think about the arrangement of these objects in space. This is often an intuitive, spontaneous act. I want the space that my work inhabits to serve as a domain that is halfway between the concrete reality of the things I make and that of the meaning objects acquire when they are perceived in the subjective terms of a self.