Joanna Poag

BIOGRAPHY

Joanna Poag loves the tactile and process-based nature of clay and has held a dynamic studio practice for the past ten years. Her work explores memory as it relates to line, color, and pattern. She holds an MFA from Rochester Institute of Technology and exhibits nationally and internationally. Joanna has participated in several residencies and recently exhibited with Soft Times Gallery in San Francisco, California. In addition to her art practice, Joanna is an instructor at a local college in Rochester, NY where she resides with her husband and three young children.

ARTIST STATEMENT

My work explores time and structure in its various states as it relates to personal narrative and memory. I create multiple patterns using colored clay and then splice them together into an intuitive, quick composition. I make in an emotional space; my work is based on mood, season, current feelings or experiences, things I'm thinking about, etc. I'm exploring the fullness and often disjointedness of my experience. For much of my life, I have obscured what I really think about or believe under a guise of politeness, accommodation, responsiveness, affirmation. It obscured who I was as a means for protection but also allowed me to move towards what I wanted in the best way I knew how.

I'm really interested in the idea of soft vs hard both using clay as a physical material and also as it relates to expectations of women. Like textiles, clay is connected to "women's work" and considered a diminutive art; narratives disguised in emotionally charged scraps, now transformed to stone.

For me, the most valuable aspect of collage is the cutting up and rearranging of elements that already exist. For centuries, women have been making compelling, complex arrangements of the scripts and scraps we’ve found or been given. This work mirrors my own experiences of fragmentation, and the revealing and obscuring of information.

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Instagram: @joannapoag