Visiting Artist Residency: March 18 - 22, 2009

Artist Biography
Gay Outlaw’s sculptural work explores form through structure, pattern and translation. She has had solo shows at SFMOMA (1997 SECA art award), the University of California Long Beach, and Mills College Art Museum. She has been included in group shows at the Berkeley Art Museum; the Bronx Museum; the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles; the University of California, Los Angeles; California College of Arts; and the Sculpture Center in New York. She studied at The University of Virginia, Ecole de Cuisine La Varenne in Paris, and The International Center for Photography. Her work is profiled in the comprehensive overview of contemporary sculpture Sculpture Today (2007).

Residency Statement
I have worked with glass frequently since 2004, when I was invited to produce work as a visiting artist at Public Glass here in San Francisco. Earlier in my career, I had worked with casting caramelized sugar, which shares some of the characteristics of glass. I also took classes at Pilchuck for two consecutive summers in 1993 and 1994 in kiln casting and cold working. After my experience at Public Glass, my first few pieces were blown into molds. I also did some experimentation with slumping in the kiln over ceramic molds. For the most part, the works that resulted were multiple-piece (65-108) and presented on the floor (see slides). I have used mirroring in a number of pieces.

Last summer, I had the pleasure of returning to Pilchuck as an-artist in-residence. I was very nervous about working with the gaffers, since up to that point I had confined myself to using molds to derive my forms in glass. I loved the process of presenting a form in plasticene and watching how the gaffers evolved their approach to recreating it in glass. It was an exercise in really looking at a model form as a team, and then using the experience and the artistic strengths of the gaffers to try to achieve something interesting.
I would approach a residency at the Museum of Glass in much the same way. I have several plasticene studies for unique pieces, and I would anticipate that we also go down some unforeseen paths as a result of the collaboration.

I want to explore color more (while at Pilchuck I worked with many variations of orange), and I want to try to preserve surface character, such as “chill-marks” from contact with metal, in combination with the blown form. I do not want to make fifty of the same thing—rather, I would like to make unique pieces that have sculptural interest in and of themselves.