Jim Kearns

Artist Statement

“One persons trash is another’s treasure” is the heart of this series of shard vessels. I was working in two studios, at the time, which used recycled material. The glass department used recycled glass to charge the furnaces while the ceramics studio used clay shards to create grog. There were large buckets and bins of shards for everyone’s use. The textures and shapes of the fragment glass and clay shards began to catch my eye, and I would create unique forms with them in my mind and sketchbook. I liked the idea of taking the broken and discarded work of others and myself to make unique structures that completed the vessels. The use of ceramic and glass shards to create the vessels only made sense to me, because of the materials’ long history of the vessel. The shards were assembled with epoxy in an intuitive fashion based on the shapes of the pieces and the shape of the vessel. The sculptures were then painted to unify the form and eliminate the distraction from the different types of colors of the shards. The discarded trash of the other artists and myself became many different conversations to create a new and unique language regarding form and recycling.