Shae Bishop
Bio
Shae Bishop was born in a small cabin in Tennessee and grew up mainly in Louisville Kentucky where he spent his childhood half at his desk and half in the woods, cultivating his two main passions: art and reptiles.
Choosing the path of a maker, he attended the Kansas City Art Institute where he earned his BFA in ceramics and art history. During his time as an undergraduate he also learned to sew clothing and began a studio practice that explored the relationships between ceramics and textiles. Connections between the medias’ cultural histories, pattern-making systems, and interactions with the body led him to start a series of wearable garment sculptures made of interlaced ceramic tiles.
After completing a two-year residency at Red Star Studios in Kansas City, Bishop moved to the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. While there he worked as studio assistant to sculptor Cristina Córdova, became part of the local craft community, and assisted classes at the Penland School of Crafts. Bishop was a summer resident at the Archie Bray Foundation in Montana, and a visiting artist at San Diego State University, California College of the Arts and elsewhere. Residencies, classes, and research have also taken him to Hungary, Turkey, Mexico, Cuba, Puerto Rico and Indonesia.
At the end of several years of travel, Bishop moved back to North Carolina. He is a co-founder of Treats Studio in Spruce Pine and shares a house with his partner Annie Evelyn, a furniture maker, as well as two dogs and a snake.
artist Statement
My artwork uses the language of clothing 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 through clothing, and about how we fashion our cultural 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.
exhibitions
