Guest Artist: Peter Sherman

PETER SHERMAN

Peter Sherman received his Ph.D. in animal behavior from the University of California at Davis.  He studied birds in the Amazonian Basin in Peru, dragonflies in Japan, and ghost crabs in the Sultanate of Oman, where he worked for a year at Sultan Qaboos University as a Fulbright Scholar. He was a newly tenured Biology professor at Transylvania University when he had a stroke that caused aphasia, an inability to find or speak the words he wants. He turned to ceramics as a means of expressing himself and exploring the relationships among humans, animals, and the natural world.

ARTIST'S STATEMENT

My pieces are personal and intimate, revealing facets of my world but ultimately remaining cryptic.  I like working on a small scale and try to make carefully crafted objects that have a great deal of detail.  Pieces with many small elements require an observer to make a close study of the work, and I want to make people slow down.  I often play with scale within a single piece, combining objects or animals that do not match in scale.  This creates a disconnect within the piece, and thus slight discomfort and confusion for an observer.

Often an object in one of my pieces has more than one meaning and may represent a greater entity or concept.  A single bird may represent the entire natural world, and a lone dog is both a representation of a particular dog and of blind hope.

I also like to create works that you cannot figure out immediately.  At the first glance, one of my pieces may seem open and evident. But a dreamlike sense pervades many of my works, leaving the observer unsure about the meaning and requiring thought and time spent with the work to understand it.  This means that time is an unseen but necessary dimension of my work.

For more about Peter Sherman and his work, visit: http://petertsherman.weebly.com

The Lost World