Mallory Wetherell is an Associate Professor at the University of Nebraska at Kearney, where she teaches ceramics and drawing. She received her BFA from the University of South Carolina and her MFA from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth.
After graduate school, Mallory lived and worked in Philadelphia, teaching at Tyler School of Art and serving as Gallery Coordinator of The Clay Studio. She has twice been a summer artist in residence at the Archie Bray Foundation in Helena, Montana and was named an Emerging Artist in the field by Ceramics Monthly magazine in 2015. In the fall of 2022, Mallory will be a Price Artist in Residence in Taos, New Mexico, while on sabbatical. Mallory is married to a fellow artist and is mom to a seven-year-old daughter, a four-year-old son, and two furry babies.
Mallory creates one of a kind works on porcelain. Each piece is hand-painted using washes of underglaze and fine brush strokes and then fired to cone six. The imagery is graphic in nature often with feminist undertones.
ARTIST STATEMENT: Throughout history, women have served as artistic muses, their bodies put on display for purposes of both glorification and sexualization. From the Venus of Willendorf, to The Birth of Venus, to every other post on social media today, the female body has been a common object on display. Inadvertently, all of society has been taught to openly look at it, to freely analyze it. And as a result, the idea that we – as women – can look at ourselves, clearly and uninhibited, is unrealistic. There is undoubtedly subconscious imprinting from both history and the surrounding world that filters into our notion of self.
And our awareness of self – of being other than just human – begins when we are just girls. As a mother, raising a daughter, this body of work reflects the complexities of being female. The work contains both pieces of empowerment and self-deprecation. They are small narratives of a much larger and timeless story – snapshots that expose internalized thoughts regarding double standards and the limitations of a superficial society.
