Chloe Rizzo
The art & science of pottery, glaze and sculpture combined into stunning shapes and textures.
From Chloe Rizzo:
We have an intrinsic desire to develop and communicate our ideas about personal identity through the lens of our experience. I am interested in the senses, the language we create without words, and how commonly overlooked things translate the world in which they exist. My artwork documents the complexity of my own experience through the manufacture of hand built ceramic figure sculpture, enamel painted cast glass and porcelain relics.
Much of my training was in figure sculpture inspired by the sensuality of Rodin’s figures, Brancusi’s Minimalism and
Giacometti’s raw depictions of Existentialism. However, I was most intrigued by the Feminist Art Movement of the 1970’s. The women who honestly and brutally used their bodies to question the acceptability of predetermined roles energized me. Desperate to contribute to this historic ongoing conversation, I poured over feminist journals and photographic records in the university library. Like many of the women in my family, I found my voice in my hands, and chose to pursue study in ceramics to better understand the relationship between my desire to create something tangible and my feelings about identity.
Early in my career, I focused on refining my life size self-portraiture by minimizing imagery to capture the most
poignant details of sensory experiences in visual form. This resulted in small-scale work, molded and repeated for larger installations. The mold making and slip casting processes allowed me to move through imagery at a speed more akin to my thoughts and expanded my experimentation into other materials that reflected my fluid feminine role, fragile sense of self, and evolving sense of place.
My most recent body of work is a further exploration of personal identity created through textiles collected and made for the body, domestic spaces and nurturing. My veiled figures are sculpted and layered with different combinations of fragile materials and fabrication techniques, including clay, glass and textiles to capture the illusive qualities of light. I have always been fascinated by the relationship people have with fashion, how clothing is collected, touched, coveted and used to create bodily identity. Veils are used and worn for many different and sometimes contradictory reasons, to conceal, to symbolize or to tell a story without words. While a veil is an object, it is also an act shrouded in mystery, controversy and intrigue.
Chloe Rizzo is a figure sculptor and teaching artist. Much of her work is done in clay and glass with reference to her classical training in Sculpture at Rowan State University, where she earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1998. She continued on to earn her Master of Fine Arts in Ceramics at the Rochester Institute of Technology, School for American Crafts in 2001 and a post baccalaureate study at the University of Colorado in Boulder.
She deeply believes the philosophy that creating art is a powerful act that can result in transformation, and everyone deserves that opportunity. Chloe has been an exhibiting and teaching artist for over 18 years, working with diverse populations in both public and private institutions across the country, including the Seattle Academy of Art, Seward Park Art Studio, Perkin’s Center for the Arts in NJ, Foci Minnesota Center for Glass Arts, and Arts Corps. Her work can be found in many private collections and the permanent collection of the Museum of Western New York Art at the Burchfield Penney Art Center. Before relocating to her new studio in St. Paul, Minnesota, Chloe was an Instructor of Fine Arts for Amarillo College and West Texas A&M University. In 2017 Chloe relocated to her studio in Minnesota, where she is working with multiple municipalities to develop culturally relevant inclusive making spaces, creative vocational
training and public art opportunities for at risk communities in the North End of St Paul.