Shae Bishop
Bio
Shae Bishop grew up in Kentucky, where he began working in ceramics at an early age. He earned his BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute. While an undergraduate, he also learned to sew clothing and began a studio practice that explored the relationships between ceramics, textiles, and the body.
After a two-year residency at Red Star Studios in Kansas City, Bishop moved to the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. There, he worked for sculptor Cristina Córdova, started his own studio, and became part of the Penland area craft community. Bishop was a resident artist in the Kohler Arts/Industry program and at the Archie Bray Foundation in Montana, and a visiting artist at San Diego State University, the University of Wisconsin, and elsewhere. Residencies, classes, and research have also taken him to Austria, Hungary, Turkey, Mexico, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Indonesia, and Japan. In 2021, he co-founded Treats Studios, a multi-function arts building in Spruce Pine, North Carolina.
Bishop has a lifelong passion for herpetology, which often informs his art practice. He currently lives in Richmond, Virginia, where he shares a home with his partner Annie Evelyn, two dogs, and a snake.
artist Statement
Clothing is a visual language I use to construct cultural and personal narrative. I’m interested in the stories told by what we wear, through history and in our world today. Stories about how we create identity and communicate, and about how we fashion our artifacts and think about the materials that constitute them.
The materials I use form a conceptual foundation for me. Ceramics and textiles share a widespread familiarity. From floor tiles to dinner plates, from shirts to bed sheets, we often interact with these materials and our perceptions of them are deeply linked to their functions. Their physical characteristics seem to complement yet oppose one another: one hard and fragile, the other soft and supple.
Many of my garments are made by lacing together hundreds of ceramic tiles with fibers, making the rigid flexible as tile becomes textile. By merging these materials, I disrupt assumptions about function and draw attention to the role of dress in communication and personal identity. The patterns I create in these pieces, like clothes themselves, are part of a deep-rooted visual language that can transcend history and medium. Carefully fitted to the body, the garments are an architecture of self; they enclose and protect while also speaking about what lies within. Through photographs of myself wearing these garments, I provide additional context, giving a glimpse into the world each piece inhabited before the viewer encountered it.
Drawing connections between diverse craft traditions, cultures, and my personal history, I create wearable portraits, building stories around the body. history, I create wearable portraits, building stories around the body.
exhibitions
