Cheryl Ann Thomas was born in Santa Monica, California and graduated from the Art Center College of Design with a BFA. Before practicing art full time in the late 1990s as a ceramic sculptor, Thomas worked as a grade school teacher. She lives and works in Ventura, California.
Thomas creates her elegant, intricate works using the age-old coiling technique. Unlike other sculptors who integrate the coils to create a smooth surface, Thomas retains the integrity of each thin, serpentine coil and the imprint of her hand, giving the works their textured surfaces. She creates tall cylinders of thin, coiled porcelain that when fired, collapse and fold in on themselves. Chance and unpredictability dictate the process. “I pinch the coils together but don’t use anything to really make them stick. The coils interact with each other in the kiln and fold or break. They’re perfectly symmetrical when I put them in,” Thomas says. Sometimes she combines these accidental forms to create a new piece for a second or multiple firings. Her practice is inquiry based in that she begins with a question, much like a scientist would begin with a hypothesis, and then experiments in the studio. This intuitive, organic approach to making imitates processes in the natural world. “The fact that it’s built up coil by coil,” Thomas says, “that’s the way a lot of things in nature grow.” Her works gain their subtle hues through oxides like manganese, black iron, and cobalt – “the same things that color stones,” Thomas says.
The textures of her sculptures not only echo textiles, frayed or splitting at the seams, but also natural elements like dried corn husks or peeled tree bark. Their slumped shapes call to mind both abandonment and repositories. Thomas says that her works, which she calls relics or artifacts, “are the remains of human intervention. These sculptures form a permanent record of my interaction with the material.” She says she “invites the physics of failure during the firing.” The works in both their form and content remain open ended and continuous. Drawn to silence, sensuality, chance, and loss, she developed a process that enfolds these elements into a distinct experience of creation and destruction.
Thomas has exhibited her work in solo and group shows in New York, Los Angeles, and Santa Fe. Numerous collecting institutions hold her work in their permanent collections such as the American Museum of Ceramic Art, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, and Fuller Craft Museum, among others. Her work was recently featured in Melting Point: Movements in Contemporary Clay at the Craft and Folk Museum which highlighted ceramicists for their experimental manipulations of clay to expand the technical, aesthetic, and metaphoric potential of the medium.
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