Pamela Wilson
Bio & Artist Statement
Pamela Wilson is a visual artist, working primarily in clay, fiber and craft-based performance/community-building. She learned to make pots and weave as a child and has maintained a studio practice that includes making, teaching, assisting elder artists and developing community arts projects. Grounded in modernist/postminimalist aesthetics and functional design, she utilizes labor-intensive materials and making methods that include the local growing, spinning and dying of fiber and colorants, mixing custom slips and dyes, kiln-building, large-scale communal wood firing and experimental atmospheric high and low-fire surface design. The materials themselves are elemental and less predictable than commercially purchased materials or processes—clays, plants, fiber, animal hair, oxides, smoke, melted ash. The surfaces available through these materials are not easily replicable through industrial or commercial means.
The work of the hand and the action of making is present in each object and each material or tool is carefully chosen with regards to its efficacy and impact. This allows for a holistic, system-based perspective on materials and processes. Identifying the why and at what cost of each material allows for an ethic of care, which is central to the making process. By growing, digging, building or mixing many materials from scratch, she is able to maintain an intimate engagement with the natural world, the materials, the body and the nature of the object’s use. This does not mean that contemporary kilns, materials or tools are rejected--they are used with consideration to what is gained and what is lost across multiple domains.
A commercially produced chemical dye might offer efficacy, while posing risk to local water systems or relying on fossil fuels for its production or transport. A backyard dye plant might yield a similar color and add a constellation of less obvious benefits: supporting pollinating insects, protecting a watershed, composting back into the ground after use, preserving a pre-industrial handwork skill, beautifying the built environment and providing community with an up-close learning and harvesting. A larger-scale communal wood kiln might offer impracticalities, like only firing once or twice a year, but it facilitates relationships, community and knowledge-sharing that a smaller kiln could not. This systems-based thinking allows for an ethic of care that mimics the intimacy of the objects created.
In addition to working as an artist, Pamela is trained as a psychotherapist and specializes in family-building, birth, loss and the perinatal period. Psychodynamic and gestalt perspectives on cycles of life, death and generational transformation deeply inform her making and visual language. She studied visual art, writing and performance at Bennington College under Barry Bartlett, Dean Snyder, Carol Diehl and Susan Sgorbatti and has a MA in clinical mental health counseling from Goddard College. She currently maintains a studio at Studio Place Arts in Barre, VT.