Bowie Croisant

Artist Bio

Bowie Croisant’s earliest appreciation for form and function is the farm machinery he remembers seeing while growing up in rural southeast Kansas. The edges and planes of his geometric forms are intended for a soda firing’s coats of color. He uses Computer Aided Drafting, or CAD software, to design forms for slip cast components that are assembled to shape his sculpture and functional ware. Croisant received a BFA from Kansas State University in ceramics and spent a year the Kansas City Art Institute as a special status student. His work is in multiple public and private collections including the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art.

Artist Statement

I have found myself continually returning to the idea of cumulative information, asking myself questions such as, “how can information reveal itself through repetitive process?” Perhaps more importantly, before those ideas, I am seeking to understand my personal encounter with material from a fundamental perspective. What happens when I touch clay? What should I do with it? And how does it operate as a means of recording action?

Nearly every human being has had the experience of squeezing clay, forming coils, creating form. I often think in terms of these types of primal, instinctual actions/experiences, but seek to place my methods on a spectrum. I aim to create with direct (yet often mediated) processes and am always observant of my engagement with material. Clay is primary, but anything that makes its way into my studio becomes a part of the dialog. I am interested in highlighting interactions between my body and material, as well as ephemeral processes that are often only visible in the studio. I ultimately aim to produce work intuitively, and often think of the advice of Sol Lewitt’s famous letter to Eva Hesse, “You must practice being stupid, dumb, unthinking, empty. Then you will be able to DO!”

I find I am most satisfied with my production when I am able to work in a thus inspired intuitive mode, only later making sense and order of what I am doing. My goals through this approach are to shed some light on the intangible acts of making, providing notions of both entropy and potentiality. Given a large enough sample size, what can we learn through these actions? When placed into systems, stacked upon one another, do they reveal patterns, in/consistency, potentially something unexpected and new?