A Multimedia Art Talk with Jim Shrosbree

Shrosbree has exhibited nationally and internationally, with work in many major museums and galleries. He is also an author, and a professor at Maharishi International University. 

Art & Object sat down with Shrosbree to talk about the evolution of his artistic process. 

Megan D Robinson: When we last spoke, you’d just received a Guggenheim Fellowship. How has your work evolved since then?

JS: That's a big question. Mainly, there's been more back and forth between sculpture and painting, and they've been informing each other. I dove more into painting, and found a relationship between the flatness of shapes that I'm painting and some of the planer elements in my sculpture. Those elements work as a transition to the wall.

A majority of my work has been wall-mounted, or interacted with the wall, so a kind of plastic relationship with the wall is developing– similarly to how a painting relates with the wall. Painting influences the sculpture, and drawing connects the two, because that's the way I work around forms. I look at them in terms of a shape, and that becomes a form, and that changes the perceptions.

For me, working is very internal. It's self discovery. It's an excuse to find out more about myself and to exercise certain muscles or parts of myself, intellectually, emotionally, spiritually. 

MDR: Your work is very tactile. How important is texture to you?

JS: That has to do with the skin that goes on the form, or the skin that's on a canvas. In terms of its effect on a form, I'm looking at whether there's absorption of light, or whether there's reflection of light, at whether there's something in between, and at what the transition is from one area to another area. How do they either contrast with each other or graduate into each other? 

I use a lot of varied materials in the sculpture studio. Often, things start with a clay armature, which may be glazed once, but then I integrate in other things from my studio. There might be a glassy clay surface that looks good with cloth against it, or a disrupted surface from a firing–and a piece of plexiglass looks really good against that.

I work with found materials. Collage is very instrumental for me. Collage, a process where things are found, torn, cut, and used in a drawing or a painting, affords happenstance in putting things together. It challenges your organizational capacity. It's pretty instinctive–finding a rightness as to the way things can feel. The key for me is just moving stuff around to see who's friends with who. 

I like to build things up, to get some kind of physicality on the surfaces. I stack elements in order to develop that interrelationship. The relationship of one surface to the other starts to create meaning–there are layers of moments that happen during the process, indicating time in some sense.

MDR: Do you use glazing as part of that process of building layers?

JS: Yes. In the beginning–in ceramics–you're finding out what the do's and don'ts are, so that you can get a “good” glaze to happen. But the best stuff happens when there are glaze defaults when things don't go right, or they're under-fired. How can you mix a glaze then to make that happen?

It’s purely a relationship, aesthetically and tactically, of all these elements and surfaces, which ultimately needs to become a poetic relationship. 

MDR: Ceramics requires a certain amount of detachment. How does that influence your practice? 

JS: Ceramics teaches a lot, because–especially if it's something like Raku or high fire reduction or wood firing–you're not going to get something that's predetermined out of the kiln. It's a message in a bottle, in a sense. 

I think the nature of kiln firing teaches you to continually stretch yourself. 

MDR: What do you hope to convey or share with viewers through your work?

JS: It's more about entering into a conversation with people through the work and not necessarily about what I hope to convey. It’s about what might spark an inspiration or an interpretation.