ROCK SPRINGS – The Art Gallery at Western Wyoming Community College will open its first Spring 2014 exhibit, “Lip Shoulder Foot,” onWednesday, Jan. 15, at the Rock Springs campus. Five distinctive artists will display their diverse works as part of the ceramics art survey, which runs until Feb. 27.

On Thursday, Feb. 27, the show will conclude with a presentation by three of the exhibiting artists – Matt West , Paul F. Morris and Margaret Haydon – beginning at 11:30 a.m. in the Gallery and concluding at 2 p.m. in Room 1309. This presentation is free and open to the public.

The “Lip Shoulder Foot” gallery show will feature the ceramic work of five artists: Bart Fetz, WWCC Instructor of Ceramics and 3D Art/Design; Margaret Haydon, Associate Professor of Ceramics at the University of Wyoming; Paul F. Morris, Adjunct Instructor of Ceramics at Front Range Community College; Steve Schrepferman, Ceramic Artist, of Cody, WY; and Matt West, Instructor of Art at Laramie County Community College.

These artists’ works illustrate and celebrate the diversity of forms and functions inherent in the ceramic medium. West’s work, for example, includes fantastically ornate teapots that he says serve as “an aesthetic, sculptural form(s) to celebrate the breath of human experience.”

“I aspire to craft my teapots with an invitation to touch, for human contact, for something to hold on to, for contemplation, as well as celebration,” West says in his artist’s statement. “I search out contrasts in viewpoints of human qualities, hard to hold versus comforting, aggressive versus serene, intimate versus elusive. My teapots speak of challenges, duality, tension, and uncertainty, as does life itself.”

WWCC Gallery Director and Professor of Art Florence McEwin notes that West’s Teapots play with functionality and expression simultaneously. West’s work appears in collections at the Wyoming State Museum in Cheyenne; in the Rudy Turk Collection at the Arizona State University Museum; and at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, IL, among others. He was a Conference Presenter for the National Art Education Association in 2005.

Just as West explores and expresses his artistic themes through the teapot form, Paul F. Morris investigates the notion of behavioral reciprocity through the form of the ewer, an ornate, vase-shaped pitcher, which Morris uses to explore gender themes and the interplay between “filling and emptying, giving and receiving, containing and dispensing, communication and understanding, presence and absence, male and female, touching and being touched, seeing and being seen, imposing and deferring, creation and destruction.”

“My intention is to make innovative, vigorous, potent, sculptural objects, gender explicit, and identifiably 21st-century American,” Morris says in his artist’s statement. “I trust that the thoughtful viewer will detect some irony in the work, more than a touch of humor, and a palpable resonance with their own human body.”

For McEwin, Morris’s playful forms, heightened with color, evoke animal attributes in some instances, just as much as human sensibility. Morris’s work appears in collections at the Toki Municipal Institute of Ceramics in Toki City, Japan; at the Siena Art Institute in Siena, Italy; and at the Denver International Airport, among others. He won Best in Show in 2010 for his work in the group exhibition, A New Decade of Clay, at Sierra Nevada College in Incline Village, NV.

In contrast to that of Morris and West, Margaret Haydon’s work focuses on the animal world, and in particular the striking appearance of the sturgeon, which forms the central concept of her ceramic pieces in “Lip Shoulder Foot.” Haydon has cast molds of various species of sturgeon, as well as other image components such as aspen branches, spheres, and buttresses, and uses the casts to build “frieze-like” installations, individual wall, and freestanding compositions.

“I also incorporate the components into a series of work I call ‘ironic’ caviar vessels, featuring sturgeon imagery and wheel-thrown vessel forms,” Haydon says in her artist’s statement. “We live in the company of animals, unaware of our impact on their shrinking populations. With this work I hope to inspire curiosity and wonder about one singular creature, and, in turn, perhaps spark a broader thoughtfulness about our physical environment. The sturgeon motif is a lens I use to examine our changing natural world.”

“The delicacy, yet seriously technical efficiency, of Haydon’s work is a wonderful addition that broadens the perspective of this clay presentation,” McEwin says.

Haydon’s work is exhibited at the International Centre for Sturgeon Studies in Nanaimo, B.C., Canada; at the HAKI Research Institute for Fisheries, Aquaculture and Irrigation in Szarvas, Hungary; and in the Governor’s Capitol Art Collection, in Cheyenne, WY, among other collections. Haydon was awarded the Seibold Professorship, which recognizes commitment to teaching, by the UW College of Arts and Sciences for 2009-10.

Animal forms also play a role in Bart Fetz’s work as “unconscious impulses and conscious decisions,” he says in his artist’s statement. “Layers of significance – form and surface, image, content, visual cohesion, functionality – are combined.  There resides in all things a kind of energy. I endeavor to express this through the utilization of asymmetry within the symmetry of process…. I am dedicated to exploring this aspect of reality in my work, trying to depict as much of the ‘real world’ as I can.”

“Fetz’s forms reflect his experiences growing up and living in Wyoming, translated into allegorical imagery that celebrates both nature and the clay,” McEwin says.

Fetz’s work is part of collections at the University of North Texas School of Visual Arts; at the University of Wyoming Department of Art; and at the Governor’s Mansion in Cheyenne, WY, among others. He is a 2005 recipient of the Governor’s Purchase Award.

The inspiration for Steve Schrepferman’s work comes from the natural Western landscape where he has lived throughout his life. Schrepferman said he uses secondary materials in combination with soft clay forms to set up cause-and-effect relationships.

“I focused on unifying the two or three materials used in the construction, striving to make all the parts necessary to the visual impact of the form,” Schrepferman says in his artist’s statement. “I wanted the pieces to read as though the finished clay was responding to the effects of the secondary component; in this case, the clay was still soft, swelling in the bindings of a rigid material.”

“Like the contours of landscape, there is a definite yet oblique femaleness in the sculptural shape of Schrepferman’s bound pots,” McEwin notes.

The visual cue for this approach, Schrepferman says, was a blizzard landscape in eastern Colorado that the artist spied from his seat on a commercial flight to New York.

“The wind had skimmed the snow from the center of each cultivated field and piled it against the downwind fences,” he recalls. “From above, it appeared that the earth had swelled and was still straining upwards against the mesh of fence lines. This powerful image remained with me and, over time, became a part of my work.”

“Like the contours of landscape, there is a definite yet oblique femaleness in the sculptural shape of Schrepferman’s bound pots,” McEwin says.

Schrepferman has exhibited his work at the Denver Art Museum, the University of Wyoming Art Museum, and the Missoula Museum of the Arts, among other venues. He is the 2009 recipient of the Buffalo Bill Historical Center’s William Weiss Purchase Award.

The work of Schrepferman and the other artists will be on exhibit at Western beginning Wednesday, Jan. 15. Matt West, Paul F. Morris and Margaret Haydon will be on campus to close the exhibit with a presentation beginning at 11:30 a.m. on Thursday, Feb. 27.

For more information about “Lip Shoulder Foot,” contact WWCC Gallery Director and Professor of Art Florence McEwin at (307) 382-1723, or at fmcewin@wwcc.wy.edu.