Alison Owen

Biography

Alison Owen makes ceramics, collages, paintings and site-specific installations about how objects are presented, and presented again, over time. Her source material is outdated printed matter, such as old art books, travel guides and home-decorating manuals, and her installations borrow the conventions of museum archives and display cases, often folding in debris found on site. The core of her studio practice is the vessel. She cuts slab-rolled clay like a dressmaker's pattern into flat-ish vases that sit between two and three dimensions, and she mends cracks openly with bright polymer clay or painter's tape.

Over two decades she has shown at Smack Mellon and A.I.R. Gallery in Brooklyn, the DeCordova Museum, the Bronx Museum, the Providence Museum of Natural History, The Soap Factory in Minneapolis, Brown University's Bell Gallery, and Boise State University. Her 2018 project Daily Vase involved making one vase every day for a year. She was an Artists in the Marketplace participant at the Bronx Museum (2006), an A.I.R.

Gallery fellow (2016), and received a Rhode Island State Council for the Arts New Genres Fellowship (2010) and a Belle Foundation grant (2020). Residencies include the Joan Mitchell Center, Hambidge, Wave Hill, LMCC Process Space on Governors Island, Women's Studio Workshop, the James Castle House, and id11 in Delft.

Practice. Slab-built ceramic vessels that hover between flat image and object, collages cut from vintage printed ephemera, and shifting installations that use the language of museum display. Visible repairs mark the passage of time.