JUNE 21 - AUGUST 5

CLOSING RECEPTION:

FRIDAY, AUGUST 4, 5-7 PM

Gallery owner Charlie Barmonde is a professional potter, sculptor and educator living in Little Compton, RI. After receiving his BA in Ceramics and Art History from Marlboro College in Vermont in 1999, he worked as a studio assistant and production potter throughout New England and Florida before settling in Rhode Island and establishing his own fine craft ceramics studio in 2005. His work has been represented in galleries in New York, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Florida and Vermont and is included in numerous private collections nationwide. Charlie opened Arch Contemporary Ceramics in Tiverton, RI in June 2014 as private studio and retail shop which has grown to include a fine art gallery,  artist's residency program and online shop.

“The entanglements I constructed for this show are a sculptural exploration of several ideas woven together. The elements themselves are thrown on the wheel, trimmed to a teardrop profile, cut up and reassembled. I first began exploring this way of building after observing my son, Felix, at play with his wooden stacking blocks. I became fascinated with how he would mix and match different shapes, creating assemblages that were quite beautiful. Elegant, whimsical, each temporal sculpture exploring color, form and most interesting to me, negative spaces.

Once I arrived at a technique of building that allowed me to approach the process with something like Felix’s childlike spontaneity I became more and more aware of how my emotional state affected each composition. Some of them are dense, the negative spaces compressing one another, a tangle like a pit in your stomach. Others are airy, allowing light and shadow to become a part of each piece.

Though the technical challenge of building these sculptures, and soda firing them to over 2300°, was a significant accomplishment, at the end of this creative episode I came to understand how my interior life was revealing itself to me in real time. All tangled up.”