Red Lodge Clay Center – Short-Term Resident (AIA) 2024
Peipei Wallace was born and raised in Taiwan. She came to the US to study art education, but after her first ceramics class at the University of Idaho, she changed her major the following semester. Later, she received her BFA in ceramics with a minor in printmaking at Washington State University. After graduation, she moved to Longview WA with her husband and has been living in the area since. She was a studio potter until she started her teaching career at Lower Columbia College a decade ago. She revitalized the ceramic program and is now building a printmaking program.
I enjoy making both functional pottery and sculpture. Oftentimes I have sculptural elements in my pottery and vice versa. The themes of my work largely come from the cultural or social impacts I experience around me. As a Chinese, like everyone else in Taiwan, I was unaware of my cultural identity until I came to the US. The first few years of living here involved lots of culture-shock experience. Going back and forth between two different cultures, I find myself constantly switching between my identities, adjusting my social behavior and, a lot of times, food. So, food became a constant symbol in my work to reflect those cultural impacts. As a teacher too, the interaction between students and me, and among students, has played another important role in my work.
With my printmaking background, I use quite a few printmaking elements on my clay surface. Some methods include screenprinting, block printing and lithographic process.