in the front gallery...

Text Messages: Clay and Print
New Work by Bonnie Campbell

A series of vessels that began as worries and ended as prayers.

These objects use utilitarian design—wheel thrown vessels, letterpress printing, and desktop publishing—as a starting point for expressions of personal and cultural memory.

The texts are remnants of poems, stories, and dreams, fragments read and remembered, that haunted me—words that become incantations and offerings.

Embedding these messages in clay and firing them in the kiln is an attempt to distill and purify anxiety, transmuting a worried mind—shape-shifting the objects and the words that mark them.

They become vessels—reliquaries, eggs, boxes, amulets—that carry messages from a world both found and imagined.

Closed and open, these containers are both practical and spiritual. Like worry beads and rosaries, talismans and totems, they belong to the class of things that marry language and matter, and assume that some things can’t be seen by looking directly at them.
—Bonnie Campbell

Bonnie Campbell is a Durham potter and graphic designer. She graduated from Berea College in Kentucky, where she was trained as a studio potter in the Ceramic Apprenticeship Program. Currently she is the Art Director at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University.

also upfront... sculptures by guest artist Al Frega.

H&B will have books and recent work (including the latest Mountain Goats vinyl productions) on display and for sale. Kenny has DVDs of Bending Space available as well.

Until Thanksgiving, Al and Bonnie's works will remain lit up through the evening hours on Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays for viewing from the sidewalk.

Bella may make an appearance.

more at www.bullcityarts.org