Description

The human figure has fascinated ceramic sculptor Patti Warashina for most of her 55+ year art career. Her sustaining interest in the human figure is likely due to the fact that her own body is the closest resource from which she draws her ideas. The use of the body gives affirmation to Warashina's own daily existence, and serves as the subject of her own “visual diary” which, for Warashina, is a reminder, reflection, and observation of personal time and the civilization in which she lives. Warashina draws from her daily life and has an abnormal interest in the absurdity and foibles of human behavior, in which her figures have become the actors in her introspective narratives. Warashina's early study and exploration of freely associated “realistic” figures evolved and mutated over time to simpler, reductive, exaggerated forms, with details left only for facial features and extremities to tie the body back into a sense of reality. Instead of painting clothes on the body, Warashina prefers at this time to to minimize the surface work and use basic color in simple abstract form, as though it is “floating” over the figure, thereby giving illusion to two independent spatial realities coinciding with one another. She wants the surface to work in tandem with the simplification of body form. The abstract quality of the surface work also erases and denies the identification of time, era, and nationality of the work. Warashina hopes to speak of the universal quirks of all human nature.