Jamie Bates Slone – Red Lodge Clay Center

Jamie Bates SloneNorman, Oklahoma


Red Lodge Clay Center – Short-Term Resident (AIA) 2018

Jamie Bates Slone is a figurative sculptor living and working in Norman, Oklahoma. Jamie received her MFA from the University of Kansas and her BFA from the University of Central Missouri. Her current work addresses the fragility of the human spirit in relation to her family’s history with physical and mental illnesses.

 

Through conjured memory, I revisit my history with physical and mental illness. My current work is a reflection of those memories with an emphasis on the relationship between human biology and human emotion. This type of introspection has caused me to be both wary of the future and empathetic of the past.

By using the figure as a metaphor for illness, I am able to convey the sentiments often correlated with disease and disorder. My surface choices are based in psychological research on the connection between color and emotion. My intent is for one to imagine the surface of the skin as a reflection of what is happening inside the body and mind.

In my studio practice, anxieties about my own physical and mental health and obsessions with mortality manifest themselves in the choice of diminutive scale, charged surfaces, and uneasy body language within the figures. These are ideas that are continuously shifting and evolving as I think about how I want these objects to be perceived.