Biography
Benjamin Oswald received his MFA at Emily Carr University of Art and Design and was a recipient of the Robert Weghsteen Memorial Award in ceramics. His practice involves the creation of vessels and sculpture and is an examination of their spaces and interactions. Oswald has won awards both provincially and internationally for his work and recently completed a residency at the International Ceramic Research Centre in Skælskør, Denmark. This November he will be working at CPIFAC (Centre Professionnel International de formation aux Arts Céramiques) in Velaine-en-Haye, France studying jarre à la corde, a semi-industrial French technique that has been used traditionally for hundreds of years in Europe for building multiples of ceramic vessels and sculptural works. He currently works as a professional artist and arts educator in Treaty 6 Territory - Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.
Artist Statement
My work situates itself at the intersections of art, design, and contemporary craft and investigates locations where visual language breaks down. My recent works have explored themes such as absence, inner space and resonance. I make work using minimalistic aesthetics and industrial processes to produce carefully profiled objects with the traces of the hand removed. This homage to a more reductive and design-based process speaks to my desire to tease out the underlying structure of a thing and then see it multiplied and reworked in combinatory ways to produce rhythms, contrasts or acts of excavation.
Ceramic vessels have a well developed vocabulary referencing the human body. For example, a vase has a foot, belly, shoulder or neck. I am interested in the ceramic vessel’s symbolic connection to the body and the relationships that can be invoked upon them through their placements in space. While the exterior of the vessel is well defined, the inside of the vessel is not and is frequently referred to as the void or something to be filled. One of the questions in my work looks at the void and what is (or was) there or what we imagine to be there. In this way I ask questions about the interference between surface and void, light and darkness, material and immaterial, presence and absence, and body and soul as a means of exploring the concept of innerspace.