Martha Russo
Sculptor, ceramicist Martha Russo pushes the boundaries of her medium.  Molding paper-thin ceramic forms and putting them in awkward and unnatural positions, makes the viewer understand fragility in the purest sense.  Russo’s installation “Nomos” that will be displayed at the museum is made from thousands of organically shaped porcelain tubes.  Some reach out straight like the inquisitive trunks of elephants, nearly 2 feet long; some are bent, curving in toward the wall; some appear tangled, like the loops of a terry cloth towel.

Martha Russo’s intrigue with art, kinesthetics, movement, and developmental biology and psychology began to coalesce during her undergraduate years at Princeton University in New Jersey (1985). While getting a Master of Fine Arts degree in ceramic sculpture at the University of Colorado in Boulder (1995), she intensified her investigation and focused primarily on issues concerning the body. Martha has received numerous grants and awards, including a Colorado Council for the Arts Artist Fellowship Grant. She actively exhibits her work nationally and internationally, including venues in New York, California, New Mexico, China, Mexico, Europe, South America, and The Middle East. In addition to her own work, Martha has been a sculpture professor in the Fine Arts Department at Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design since 1996.

“In some sense, I see my art making as a way to survive; as a way to make sense of some of the feelings and thoughts that constantly filter through my life and, specifically, through my body.

My work is partly about my imaginings of where and how my body processes and stores responses to moments that truly matter to me. All of the moments that I give form to are times when I am knocked off balance; when instinct and bodily reactions are automatic and unannounced.

Sometimes, I refer to actual organs - their forms, physiology, and developmental stages. I am most intrigued with the stomach, gall bladder, esophagus, pelvic area, skin, intestines, and ears. Through frenetic periods of unrestrained making with clay and, most recently, with fruit and pig intestine, the forms become abstracted and hybridized. Other times, I start with a more abstracted notion of the feeling and conjure up an imagined form, color, texture, or gravity. Only through the making do I find an ease with the materials and a form that resonates with a particular moment.

In the most basic sense, my intention is to make visible what lays concealed. “