Today we’d like to introduce you to Elaine Buss.
Hi Elaine, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
I started art like many art folks do: in my youth out of curiosity and creative inclinations. I grew up in a rural area with little resources, but craft and art are a natural part of human experience, so it was still part of my childhood. My grandfather was a woodworker, and my grandmother was a quilter, and two of my aunts paint. While I was in high school, I took college-level art courses over the summers and at night to learn more about fine art specifically. I rode the train into St. Louis from Illinois to go to the museums. When I found contemporary art, it felt like a fever. It was an invigorating way of interacting with ideas and the broader human world that created an added layer of understanding, conceptual inquiry, and emotive capacity.
It’s been a long journey since then. I have traveled and lived all over through various professional engagements. I went to undergrad at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, and I earned my MFA at Ohio State University. I have had opportunities far and wide, including artist residencies or teaching engagements in Colorado, Rome, North Carolina, Vermont, Maine, Tennessee, Nebraska, Connecticut, Ohio, Kansas, Missouri, and Massachusetts. One of my favorite aspects of being an artist is that travel can be part of work.
I moved to Kansas City after finishing my MFA at Ohio State. I already knew the community to be robust and supportive from living here prior to grad school. There are a lot of resources, and this abundance means that artists can be collaborative instead of competitive. I teach in the Foundation Department at Kansas City Art Institute and have a studio in the Crossroads Art District. After 8 years here (and counting), it still feels like there are opportunities I have yet to take advantage of. The community is truly a gift, and I’m so inspired by my fellow artists and appreciative of the institutions and patrons who support us.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
This career requires tenacity and dedication, so the path to get here reflects that. You have to really want this career and be committed, and I also advocate that artists’ wages and incomes be reflective of our highly specialized skillsets (we need to be done with the starving artist tropes.) Overall, it is a real privilege to be a member of the art community. Artists are some of the most interesting, thoughtful people you will meet. Curators are so incredibly intelligent and make connections to your work that are hard to see for yourself. My collectors are some of the kindest people I’ve met, and I’m so grateful for their support (at all scales!) It’s amazing to feel supported by your community in the way that different facets of the art world support each other.
A challenge that I face is that my work wants to change and shift often. I became an artist in part because it is a way to constantly be engaged in learning. My conceptual research and material focus are varied, and they pull me along like a floating leaf in a swift river. Luckily, I am finding that the longer I am an artist, the more my natural voice emerges despite material or stylistic changes. Who I am at my core as a human reveals itself more over time as I continue allowing my intuition to lead my studio work.
Certain aspects of my practice remain steady. I love materiality and transformative processes. Ceramics is a natural home for these interests, with its alchemical and magical qualities. My work wants to think about deep time, human experience, body and space, and the sacred. These broad foci are often investigated through concrete means, such as artifacts, sacred spaces, body as experience/proprioception, and animism.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
I am a sculptor and installation-based artist who primarily uses ceramics, fibers, and mixed media. I borrow aesthetic qualities from aged stone, time-worn surfaces, sacred spaces, and the ambiguity of artifacts. I am interested in the connection between physical experience, ritual, and emotive interpretation. I think of my work as where I process being human on a daily scale and within the long arch of history. Specific emotions I am excited by include wonder, awe, and mystery. My artist statement follows:
Floating in the ether of lived experience, I tether myself through phenomenological seeking, reverence for human ancestry, and animistic attunement. My work delights first in the ineffable, then gestates through sense and sensing. There is a giddy tension when the known and unknowable compete for prominence. My sculptural works and immersive installations oscillate between the implied material weight of ceramics and the elusive, untethered presence of indeterminate forms. It is humbling to be reminded that so much lies beyond our empirical grasp and to simply allow ourselves enchantment.
The magnanimous affect of sacred spaces is integral to my research. I seek sublime effect, sometimes through balance and harmony, sometimes through awe or gravity. In my work, I investigate the body’s proprioceptive mechanisms; in particular, how our bodies adjust next to unfamiliar forms in our environment with the potential to subtly alter our corporeal awareness.
My forms emerge from historical artifacts, unidentifiable fragments, weathered surfaces, and evidence of the before-us humans. Examples include ancient grinding stones, loom weights, stone arches, rain gutters, and architectural fragments. Anthropological sources provide a place of empathy with past humans and a way to understand my own humanity more thoroughly. The resulting sculptures are not meant to allude to any specific origin or culture, but rather remain anonymous and elusive.
I embrace an experimental, alchemical approach to melting raw ceramic materials into my sculptures, such as glass frits, metallic oxides, plaster, and minerals. I push the boundaries between glaze, clay, and how a ceramic object should be “finished”. Through my material combinations, I achieve haptic qualities that feel familiar, yet mysterious and unplaceable. My fascination with materials and transformative substances reflects a concern for my own materiality.
Floating between particular objects and ambiguously referential forms, I embrace the nondescript. This open space of animistic sensing holds more potentials than the concrete boundaries of knowing. I find mystery to be one of the most compelling emotions, and I try to arrive at a sense instead of a certainty in my work. I hope to grasp how the intangible and empirical can exist in the same space, giving respect and credence to each other, while still maintaining their autonomy.”
What sort of changes are you expecting over the next 5-10 years?
As a ceramicist, I am part of a material-centered artistic community. As an interdisciplinary artist, I also participate in the broader art world. I keep my finger on the pulse of both fields. In ceramics, we have seen such an incredible renaissance of approaches and material development in the recent past. What I am most excited about in our field right now is how such a wide variety of artists are able to find their niche and lead a fulfilling career using this material. The ceramics field welcomes expansion, and our entrepreneurship models match this attitude. Career models are growing in variety, some through social media, and some through artists redefining how they make a living and create their own versions of success. The larger art world follows this pattern also, where artists are still using the traditional gallery system, but also finding their own ways of thriving. I’m so excited to see what new enterprises emerge as complements to existing gallery and art advisor models.
Pricing:
- Pricing Upon Request
Contact Info:
- Website: https://elainebuss.com
- Instagram: @elainebuss
