INGE ROBERTS
Artist’s Statement
Inge Roberts is drawn to the ancient buildings and sites of those who came before, and whose imprints litter the centuries, linking us.
While traveling, she traces those links: pressing wet clay against walls, onto floors, furniture, doorknobs, eroded statuary details, and cemetery sculpture – small witnesses, easily eroded by more time, unlikely to be lifted into anyone’s focus. She uses these molds in fragmented and distorted form.
The work is stamped and patched with symbols of ancient worship, sacred and secular texts, frivolous and earnest Gallo-Roman images, medieval symbols, the hands, faces and feet of Renaissance royalty, Viking warriors and monks.
These tailings become the words in the stories these pieces tell, used gratefully and sometimes not without hesitation. The intention is to honor those forgotten artists.
When she attaches the impressions from a clay cylinder, made more than 5000 years ago in the “cradle of civilization” to a bowl made by her today in America, using a porcelain body mined in Europe, which she may texture with a basket woven two generations ago on yet another continent, then she feels suspended between their makers and reaches out to connect them.