Rebecca Hutchinson |
| Like a bird building
its nest or an insect building structure, Rebecca Hutchinson weaves her
creations
from strands of the life she finds around
her: not only indigenous fibers and clays, but also pieces of her past,
her motherhood, her hopes for the future. Hutchinson’s hanging adobe
structures seem to instinctively stretch toward the ground as plants reach
toward the sun. Groups of the pale elongate forms have been featured in
several galleries and museums, including the Appalachian Center for Crafts,
the Hartford School of Art, and the Northern Clay Center, in Minneapolis.
Hutchinson’s current exhibition at the Lowe Art Museum in Miami consists
of woven forms of sisal fiber and porcelain clay. Entitled “Connected”,
the installation highlights her signature concerns of placement and space,
the environment, and the relation of parts to the whole. Born in Kalamazoo Michigan, Hutchinson received her BA from Berea College in Kentucky. She credits her grounding in the liberal arts tradition for her habits as an artist-- for finding connections between things, for looking at art as something not abstracted and out of time but as a compilation of the moments leading up to and away from the moment of making. She was attracted to ceramics because of its sensual nature: “With clay, you have the ability to make something extremely refined and exact as well as guttural and emotional. The clay has the memory and the ability to transform to the presence and the frame of mind of the maker.” Since receiving her MFA from the University of Georgia, Hutchinson has worked both nationally and internationally as an installation maker. Much of her work is inspired by observations of human and animal architecture. The daughter of a psychologist and a scientist, she is particularly captivated by the ‘dynamics of species within place.’ For a collection of works entitled ‘Ten Sites, Ten Situations: Site works in Rural America,” Hutchinson used slurry, mill ends, grasses, and reeds from areas surrounding the museums and galleries hosting her art. “Sometimes I work not towards beauty but harshness,” Hutchinson says. In addition to nests and webs, she has studied many aspects of ecosystem dynamics and specie survival techniques, including tree gulls, which occur when an insect burrows underneath the bark of a tree, causing it to balloon out in golf-ball-sized cankers. “I’m interested not only in the visual curiosity of the gulls, but also in the larger ramifications of the insect’s relation with the host, and the benefit for the host tree to survive the activity.” Both deeply responsive to her intuitive rhythms and conscious of her own creative processes, Hutchinson is a committed teacher. Her insights and enthusiasm spark her students to dig deeper within themselves, and to push their own connections and understanding even further. Hutchinson currently serves as assistant professor of ceramics at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth. Previously, she taught at Virginia Commonwealth University, the University of Washington, and the San Francisco Art Institute. She has also participated as Resident Artist at the Banff Centre for Fine Art, Watershed Ceramics Center, the Greenwich House Pottery, The Archie Bray Foundation and the Vermont Studio Center. “I would always teach because each student is individual and distinct. No one touches the material in quite the same way, and what touches each person as profound and meaningful is equally as individual and respectful.” Hutchinson’s work has been featured in diverse forums, including Miami’s WKAT, Ceramics Art and Perception and Ceramics Monthly. She is the recipient of grants and fellowships from several universities as well as the Virginia Commission for the Arts. Hutchinson makes her homes in Marion, Massachusetts and Helena, Montana. |