The Master Series

In Memory of a Dream: A Pattern Language

A Solo Exhibition of Works by Joseph Madrigal

My research and scholarship of creative work focuses on material explorations broadly centered on clay and specifically around porcelain. My work is influenced by the complexity of memory and bodily experience through habitual, sensual, and erotic connectivity along with the capacity of empathy to carry through object, material and space. A sensitivity to clay and ceramic objects informs and intensifies the way I approach properties of other materials and objects. Body and object collide and expand in both lived and imagined space. My aim is to find moments of shift, slippage, and compression through physical and conceptual relationships.

Clay is a material that stretches across time and culture often bridging the distance between the physical and spiritual through ritual and custom. Clay is also a literal and metaphoric record of time both geological and anthropomorphic. Imbued with rich and varied histories ceramic objects reside in the background of everyday life. Our relationships to clay and ceramic objects, though often overlooked, are deeply seeded in a history of movement and display through utility and ornament. Ceramics has the advantage of already being there; it just needs to be seen and enacted. It is this perpetuity of emergence and connection to the body and materiality from which my practice is centered, expands and returns.

Recently I have been digitally scanning old family photos with particular attention to the time period of my early childhood in Watsonville, California and the greater Bay Area. This process has helped to shape my shifting perspectives on concepts of ‘space/time’ and re-placing them with a developing appreciation of ‘place/time’. Space is cold and empty; theoretical. Place is warm, populated, and storied; experiential. Family photographs emerge as useful means to play through these ideas. Snapshots of particular times in the places my family occupied in the home, out in the landscape, and all the interstitial places thereof like gardens, patios, driveways, and decks.

Joseph Madrigal currently lives in Decorah, Iowa and is an Associate Professor, Head of the Visual and Performing Arts Department, and Chair of the Art Program at Luther College. He teach courses in both ceramics and sculpture and leads the senior project in Art seminar. He received his Bachelor of Fine Arts from Miami University of Ohio concentrating in both ceramics and painting, and received his Master of Fine Arts in ceramics from Illinois State University. Joseph was born in the greater Bay Area of central California to a mother of Portuguese decent and a father who migrated ‘illegally’ from Mexico. These details mean everything and nothing to the integrity of his work.