Mar 032017
 

Hirondelle drawing IMG_0992Aperture 14, 16″ x 16″

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Anne Hirondelle in her studio

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Hirondelle’s beginnings as an artist were with clay. For over 20 years she was drawn to the vessel as an abstraction and metaphor for containment taking ideas from traditional functional pots and stretching them into architectural and organic sculptural forms. In 2002, to explore more formal ideas she abandoned her signature glazes for unglazed white stoneware and moved the work from the horizontal to the vertical plane. A year later she began painting the surfaces. Simultaneously, her drawings, once ancillary to the sculpture, took on a life of their own. Derived from the ceramic forms, drawn with graphite and colored pencil on multiple layers of tracing paper, they are further explorations of abstraction.

Her latest exhibition, Anne Hirondelle: Small Revolutions, runs February 11-April 30, 2017 at the Hallie Ford Museum of Art at Willamette University in Salem, Oregon. The exhibition, which features ceramic work and drawings, takes its title from the poem, “Still Life with Fire” by David Fenza.

We shift in our naked repose, restless,
because, if we are clay, the fingerprints
of our Maker must be within & upon us;
& after the Potter’s wheel is still, we still turn
with small revolutions of faith & doubt
as we style who & what to leave out
& who & what to hold within.

—David W. Fenza

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All images are graphite and prisma color on layered tracing paper.

Hirondelle drawing IMG_0991Aperture 12, 16″ x 16″

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Hirondelle drawing IMG_0993Partners 1, 17″ x 23″

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Hirondelle drawing IMG_0994Partners 2, 17″ x 23″

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Hirondelle drawing IMG_0995Partners 3, 17″ x 23″

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Hirondelle drawing IMG_1011Partners 4, 17″ x 23″

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Hirondelle drawing IMG_1002Triptych, overall 16″ x 40″ framed (individual images 10″ x 10″)

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Hirondelle drawing IMG_1003Slide 1, 16″ x 16″

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Hirondelle drawing IMG_1004Slide 2, 16″ x 16″

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Hirondelle drawing IMG_1005Slide 3, 16″ x 16″

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Hirondelle drawing IMG_1006Slide 4, 16″ x 16″

—Anne Hirondelle

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Anne Hirondelle working in studio

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Anne Hirondelle was born in Vancouver, Washington, in 1944 and spent her childhood as a farm girl near Salem, Oregon. She received a BA in English from the University of Puget Sound (1966) and an MA in counseling from Stanford University (1967). Hirondelle moved to Seattle in 1967 and directed the University YWCA until 1972. She attended the School of Law at the University of Washington for a year before discovering and pursuing her true profession, first in the ceramics program at the Factory of Visual Arts in Seattle (1973-74), and later in the BFA program at the University of Washington (1974-76). Anne Hirondelle has lived and worked in Port Townsend, Washington, since 1977.

Hirondelle has exhibited nationally in one-person and group shows including: New York, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Kansas City, Scottsdale and Seattle. Her pieces are in myriad private and public collections including: The White House Collection in the Clinton Library, Little Rock, AR; The Museum of Arts and Design, NY; The L.A. County Art Museum and the Tacoma Art Museum.

She was the recipient of an NEA Fellowship for the Visual Arts in 1988. In 2004, Anne was a finalist for the Seattle Art Museum’s Betty Bowen Award. In 2009 her accomplishments were recognized by the Northwest Arts Community with the Yvonne Twining Humber Award for Lifetime Artistic Achievement. The University of Washington Press published Anne Hirondelle: Ceramic Art, a book about her work in February, 2012. In 2014, she was one of four Washington State artists selected to participate in the Joan Mitchell Foundation’s Creating a Living Legacy (CALL) Program.

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David W. Fenza is a poet and the Executive Director of the Association Of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP). “Still Life with Fire” is published at NC with his permission.

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