Andrea Gill

Invited Artist

BIOGRAPHY

Andrea Gill is a ceramic artist and former professor for Alfred University. Gill creates functional vases that are decorative and sculptural. Often using hand-cut stencils and stylized patterns to decorate her work and glaze to finish off her clay vessels, Gill is one of the pioneers responsible for the reemergence of decorative earthenware and maiolica glaze techniques. The forms of Gill’s vessels reflect their decorative characteristics, contain wing-like protrusions and extensions that function as part of the total object.

She received her BFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1971, and her MFA in Ceramic Art from the New York College of Ceramics at Alfred University in 1976. While studying at Alfred, she met ceramic artist and now husband, John Gill. She later taught at Alfred University in the New York State College of Ceramics from 1984 until her retirement in 2017. Gill has been granted fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Ohio Art Council, the Archie Bray Foundation, and the American Crafts Council.

She has shown her work both nationally and internationally since 1976, and has pieces in permanent collections for various institutions including the Renwick Gallery in Washington, D.C.; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

ARTIST STATEMENT

Andrea Gill's decorated vases are functional forms that range into the realm of sculpture. While the artist adopts ideas, traditions, and styles of historical pottery, she turns them deftly around to question the very essence of the vessel form. Since 1980, when she began to work in clay full time, Gill has sought to camouflage, or to confuse the identity of her amphoralike pots by affixing winglike extrusions, or painting multiple images of vases, or other obscuring motifs on their surfaces.

Trained originally as a painter, and fascinated by the decorative techniques of Italian majolica painters, and folk artists in general, Andrea Gill has sought to contradict the three-dimensional form of her vessels by employing colorful, flat-patterned imagery. Surface decoration is essential to her work. In fact, Gill's vessels are primarily vehicles for painted decoration. Indeed, her more recent vases are covered with such dazzling pattern painting that it is often hard to distinguish the form beneath the surface decoration.

Gill begins by sketching on paper the outlines of a projected vessel. Contours are of special interest to her. "When you look at a pot," she writes; "most of the time you are looking at a line . . . even though you think of them as forms." She then hand builds the vessel according to the drawing using coils of terracotta, and bisque fires it. From this basic, often irregular shape, she produces a press mold from which numerous replicas can be made. The generic form of the molded vessel is then individually varied by adding slabs of clay. These winglike appendages become essential components in the painted decoration, for Gill treats her altered vessel form like an artist's shaped canvas.

Instagram: @gillpottery