Bio:
Crisha Yantis grew up mostly in Olympia Washington. After many years in Seattle, she moved to Athens Georgia where she received her BFA in Ceramics at the University of Georgia. Her time in Georgia included working on clay sculpture, enjoying the southern community of clay workers, watching rainstorms, and dodging mosquitos. She completed her graduate studies in ceramics at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln where she spent summers enjoying the amazing bike trails and splendid cloud filled skies of Lincoln. A few years in Gunnison Colorado were spent navigating several new roles including - making a new body of work in clay, learning printmaking, balancing life as a mother of two boys, and teaching part time for Western State Colorado University. She recently relocated back to Olympia Washington with her family to continue building adventures and carving out new directions.
Artist Statement:
Of the many directions available in clay, I am most drawn to expressing my own experiences and observations of the world around me by using the figure to explore what it means to be human. My work addresses the universal experience of anxieties, unknowns, and stages of life, within figure relationships. These relationships explore the self and the other, while also addressing questions of powerlessness, control, rigidity, and consciousness. I formally represent this through what the figures lack. Their relationship with control is presented through their rigidity and being bound in their circumstance. This intended discomfort is expressed with a combination of their facial features and formally in their inability to physically act on their concerns. Both the abstracted form and the facial features' high level of awareness are intended to draw the viewer to the piece for further investigation. This then allows a place for one to relate, experience the discomfort, find beauty, or question the circumstances. Gender, color, and space are also a part of this conversation via their sexual ambiguity, color as expression, and tension between forms. I often start with a feeling I want to convey or form I want to explore and begin by drawing those ideas. Sometimes those ideas change a bit as I build a form, but the basic ideas are laid out first. I use rough forms of slabs and pinch pieces together to build and I often add non clay materials to my work before firing, including cheesecloth and metal. My surfaces are a combination of underglazes, glazes, stains, and oxide washes.
Works that inspire me to create and have influenced my own work include a variety of contemporary narrative ceramics and sculptures, the lovely abstract animals and figures painted on Mimbres pottery, pre-Columbian figures, rock forms in nature, and much of the stylized figures throughout history.