ABOUT

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I am an artist currently in Seattle. I attended the University of Washington's graduate program in sculpture, where I received my MFA in 2022. My thesis show included a written effort and a solo show. Before that, I did my undergraduate degree at CalState Long Beach. I got a BFA in Ceramics there, and also fabricated ceramic art for various artists in relationship to the Center for Contemporary Ceramics. 

Currently I teach ceramics at the college level in Seattle and make frames as another job. I have done such things as gardening, housekeeping, accounting, art restoration, holiday lighting and even a day at a car detailer!

ARTIST STATMENT

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Althea Fultz

 

My practice is reliant on emergent patterns/symbols in my perceptual world. Through sometimes laborious tasks and an allegiance to studio time, a set of gestures or symbols emerge -some are clay lumps, lines on paper, found objects.. When the burden of  decisions reaches a certain density, its iconographic identity manifests and from there it is more labor to solidify the diverse parts without merely obscuring their emergent meaning in more detritus. My work is therefore representational of my sense-making instinct. Such as it is.

 

By creating evidence for my individual action I enter into an ipso post facto as to whether such a thing exists, and what is its place in a culture of shrinking dissimilarities. That such activity needs justification underlines the latter. I feel someone has to make such claims to the inevitability (if not necessity) of individual variation, and the appetite to do so is honestly reason enough. To address my drives as a round mammal in the world is surely acceptable from a historical perspective. “Look on my work, ye might, and despair.” 

 

The objects I make are necessary: without using the human machine such claims at mammalian materialism are poetry or gas. They range from welded sculptural installations to smol beasts made of plastilina. There are also, sumtimes, rabits.

Practically speaking, this work must retell specifics of my own life: it’s honestly the only thing I feel I have an obvious right to: of culture, I receive as environment rather than conscious fodder. My intellectual turgidness is a shield against all allusion, illusion and reference. The fact that there are rabits and other mysteries is only to be accounted for if one dare account for the general Misterie of being.