JAKE BOGGS

BIOGRAPHY

Jake Boggs is a Hawai’i-based artist, curator, and arts educator concentrating in ceramics and contemporary craft practices. He earned an MFA from the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa and a BFA from Eastern Kentucky University. His interest in ceramics has allowed him to experience the clay traditions of various cultures, weaving a tapestry of influences expressed in his work. He has exhibited widely across the United States, in Hawai'i, and South Korea, and is the recipient of multiple awards and honors for his creative work. He also serves on the board of Hawai’i Craftsmen, a Hawai’i-based non-profit that works to enrich the community through contemporary craft exhibitions and workshops. He is currently the Ceramics Studio Coordinator at the Donkey Mill Art Center in Holualoa, Hawai’i where he works to serve the community through ceramic education and programming. He keeps an active and evolving studio practice at his home in Kailua-Kona.

ARTIST STATEMENT

My work is a reflection of my curiosities, a distillation of topics from the arts, sciences, and humanities, broken down into a visual language and imbued onto the surface of volumetric forms. I am interested in how objects can serve as a means for cognitive exploration and as a conduit between disparate yet interconnected modalities. Though the service of these objects may be symbolic in some cases, the duality of aesthetics and utility is a driving force throughout my work. I am drawn to the anthropological nature of ceramic art and its advancement throughout history. I find a deep well of information in humankind's millennia-long journey of experimenting with and refining the earth beneath our feet. In contribution to this progression of craft, I incorporate elements from a breadth of vessels that are reconfigured into new unique compositions. The source material is a product of my visual research of pots in pop culture, industrial design, and archeology. Building off of the abundance of historical vessels my work re-imagines classic form, texture, color, and content within a contemporary framework. Just as potters from the Ming Dynasty or the Italian Renaissance used vessels as painterly substrates, I employ non-objective abstraction, intermixed with texture, mark, and color found in constructed and natural environments. This interplay between object and time reveals an uncanny relationship between the work and the viewer.

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