BITTER | SWEET creatures of CRYSTAL MOREY
Crystal Morey received her BFA in Ceramic Sculpture from the California College of the Arts and her MFA in Spatial Art from San Jose State University. She continues her studies through artists residencies and an expansive interests in art history and museum research. Morey currently lives Oakland California where she maintains a full-time studio practice, creating new porcelain works that are exhibited and collected around the world.
As a visual artist, Crystal Morey takes inspirations from an alternative upbringing where she closely connected with the natural landscape around her. Living in rural Northern California shaped her perspective on nature and how humans interact with land, animals and each other. Now living in an urban environment, Morey aims to show our relationship to the world around us through the fragile medium of porcelain. With this delicate material she creates a heightened sense of urgency and stress, commenting on our human evolutionary path.
Morey’s beauties, a timely addition, given our continued concern on global warming, evoke the innocence of fairytales and folklore, but also hold a much deeper narrative, exploring humanity’s effect on both the environment and entire ecosystems. Growing up in Northern California, being close to the land was part of Morey’s upbringing and the seed of which her intrigue with the environment grew. Through this closeness with the land, Morey was able to see firsthand how our species narrative is connected with the land and animals that surround us. By choosing to sculpt from the medium of porcelain, Morey’s figures root us further still into the connection between womankind and earth, with porcelain itself being delicate and silky, alchemical in materiality, and though easily broken, if cared for, can last for ages.
"I like to research animals that I find relatable in their actions and intriguing visually. In “Delicate Dependencies” I decided to focus on animals from the western United States, creatures that have an interesting history or trajectory, ones closely affected by human expansion."
"I am interested in what we consider to be “fringe” or “indicator” species. These creatures are often the first indicators and casualties of environmental change, and are often found at both ends of the food chain – small creatures being susceptible to minute habitat changes and larger creatures affected by disruptions in a long food chain. These interests led me to include creatures such as a brown bear, red fox, peregrine falcon, mountain lion and California bighorn to name a few."
There is a quiet, feminine strength to her work, balancing the qualities of solidity with fragility, myth with reality, and melancholy with mirth. Delve deep into Crystal’s sculptural imagination and learn about the conceptualization of her artistic process, as well as her participation and thoughts on the highly anticipated beautiful.
