Eliot Joanna Angell is a fourth-generation multidisciplinary artist and an Assistant Professor of Art in the Department of Visual Art and Design at the University of South Carolina Beaufort where she teaches Ceramics, Printmaking, Drawing and Design.

 

Joanna earned a BA in English from Drew University in Madison, NJ and an MFA from the University of Georgia in Athens, GA where she studied with Tamarind printmaker Charles Morgan and ceramicist Ron Meyers. She also studied with Virginia Scotchie at the University of South Carolina in Columbia SC and has been awarded numerous scholarships to advance her research at the internationally recognized Penland School of Craft in North Carolina.

 

Prior to joining the faculty at USCB in 2011, Joanna was an independent studio artist and gallerist in Walterboro SC, exhibiting and selling her work and selected works of other artists. Accepted to the “Approved Artists Roster” of the South Carolina Arts Commission, Joanna served as a teaching Resident Artist in South Carolina schools, and continues to teach workshops to adults and children.

 

Joanna’s work is exhibited nationally in solo and juried group exhibitions and belongs to collections that include The President’s Collection of the University of Georgia, The Collection of Savannah State University, and the South Carolina Palmetto Hands Collection. Her ceramics, paintings and prints are in numerous private collections in the United States and abroad, and her work is represented in the Telfair Museums’ Jepson Center store.

 

Artist Statement

 

My attention is drawn to the permeable membrane between conditional reality and transcendence, the simultaneous layers of this human experience, our clothes and our invisible core.

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(If I tell you my story, will you listen?)

 

Grounded in materiality and physical process, my work reflects in an abstract language of marks, symbols, forms and spaces my reverence for beauty. Each material I use creates the work with me.

 

In this year’s Faculty Exhibition, I include four small works: two cups, a postcard and a dress.

 

Objects of daily use can become intimately familiar. On the surfaces of these simple cups are narrative expressions of how I have navigated personal discoveries, dreams, and stories of my walk on Earth.  

 

The postcard is a similar story. It is a solar-plate intaglio print on Rives BFK grey paper and was editioned for an international exchange with 79 other artists through the Iowa State University Print Society.

 

The ceramic dress continues a twenty-plus year exploration of identity and superficiality, and may be a study for a larger work. I appropriated fragments of surface decoration from my favorite Wincanton Wood and Sons soup bowl, and worked roughly and deliberately to form the bodice from the scraps of a larger piece, channeling my inner Peter Voulkos. The juxtaposition of treatments with the material – brutal and sentimentally decorative – were a reflection of 2020 and the paradoxical capacities and fragilities of human beings. If the top part of the dress is removed, the lidded vessel underneath contains a solution for our fraught times:   Listen.