Mark Chatterley   Procession  $28,000

Williamston, Michigan

To hear the artist’s phone cast dial: 517-999-1018

Artist’s website: chatterley.com

Artist Statement: Everything is either moving toward or away from nothingness – life, death, creation, and destruction.  This is the world I find myself in.

I want my art to echo these thoughts, everything in a state of flux, changing and reforming.  A sense of decay along with life.  Nothing is permanent and nothing stays the same.

I also try to show thoughts and feelings of the human condition.  Beauty in the malformed, acceptance of the inevitable.  I am doing work or our time, for our time, even though I look to the past, the dead for inspiration.

Biography

With more than 30 years experience, Mark Chatterley is nationally and internationally known for his sculpture.

Mark creates larger-than-life ceramic figures with lava-like glazes.  His sculptures seem to have emerged from the earth’s crust.  Like the creations of a fire god millions of years ago, his sculpture possesses a primordial presence that transcends time and geography.

One might expect to find a silent grouping of his work on a South Pacific island, in an African savanna, or perhaps atop an Irish knoll.  The figures are not “pretty,” and they sometimes have an edge of intensity, not unlike Magdalena Abakanowicz’ works.  Yet, their power is expressed through an astonishing, primitive grace.  After building a kiln to accommodate his seven-foot tall, one-piece, freestanding figures, he set himself free to explore “the archetypal images that go beyond culture and time that Jung wrote about.”

Chatterley has emerged as one of the strongest ceramic sculptors of our time.  He has contributed to the force taking ceramics from the level of craft to that of high art.  In recent years, he has cast several of his large works in bronze.