Bio/Statement

Originally from Upstate New York, Claire E. Roll graduated from Gordon College with a B.A. degree in studio art: concentrating in sculpture. She completed her Post-Baccalaureate program at the School of the Museum of Fine arts in 2014 and holds a Masters of Fine Arts in Sculpture from Boston University. She lives and practices in Boston. Roll has exhibited in group and solo exhibitions locally and nationally. She has participated in sculptural symposia in the New England area and has commissioned work around the world. Roll recently exhibited at the National Association of Women Artists in New York City. She taught figure drawing and sculpture at Boston University; currently teaches Drawing 1 and 3-D design at Bunker Hill Community College; as well as teaches Stone Carving, 3D Design, and Experimental Media at Gordon College. She is also a part of the Junior/Senior Exhibitions Mentorship Program.

 

Artist Statement:

I work reciprocally and responsively to connect the varied identities of raw and reclaimed materials as a woven metaphor; to explore the nature of improvisation as call and response. To sculpt a line, is to touch a line, to reach outside of one’s own space. To feel that line become form — a physical representation of the abstract notion of time — is to understand it intimately and to embrace it as a true and real thing. When time and space become material — much like stone, or earth, or fiber — they can be dually defined as enigmatic entities both physical and transcendent. Likewise, accumulation and erasure of material allow the sum of the elements within a work to push beyond their original singularity while still retaining their identity. They remain ever unique as a part of a larger whole; they ignore rationality, break apart limitations, and embrace a fullness of being. 

As such, I require my process to hold contradictory questions within the same space; to relocate the “known” so perception can shift in the presence of a tenuous and paradoxical vibration of realities. Embracing the tension created by conscious subversion gives voice to the strength and cerebral rawness of my feminine intentionality while emboldening its delicacy and tenderness. 

The elements and materials in any work or process will invariably speak of their origin; of the time in which they were made. Only through activation — conscious participation — can the authenticity of a work become present once more. As a space or form is encountered, as one autonomous thing chooses to locate itself with another, biases are challenged and identities are decentralized. Access is granted to a realm of simultaneity that renews memory and allows effective consciousness to occur. Reconstructing the relationship between two objects, two materials, two ideas, broadens the definition of reason itself. It begins to separate the flattened and linear quality of verbal logic from more intuitive and complex forms of reasoning. Creating this workable dialectic of self and other, opens the heart to the truth of voices too quiet to hear without pause. 

DSC_9270 2.jpeg