Essays
One could argue that nature was the first artist – carving astonishing structures into wind-battered limestone, tracing the marks of absent currents in dry riverbeds, drawing traceries of shadows on moonlit fields and filigree patterns on icy windows. Such creations, both ephemeral and enduring, have long served as inspirations for artists of the human variety…
Barbara Sorensen: Nature Artist
The influence of the monumentality and drama of the Colorado mountains can unquestionably be seen in the work of Barbara Sorensen, a Floridian who spends half the year in Snowmass Village, Colorado. In the wide-open spaces of the West, where the vistas go on for miles, one is as aware of the space between the mountains as of their bulk…
Barbara Sorensen: Sculpture as Environment
From the Sacred to the Elemental
Barbara Sorensen’s work carries many meanings from its materials, forms, to its myriad references. Her works simultaneously refer to the landscape, are metaphors for passing time, and embody ideas, many of which carry ceremonial or elemental implications.
The human impulse to create three-dimensional objects and images from materials taken from the earth is a primal one-archaeologists have discovered small clay figures of humans and animals that dating to 24,000 BC…
Site Specific: Echoes
Barbara Sorensen originally considered a different career in art and earned her Bachelor of Science degree in art education from the University of Wisconsin. As an undergraduate at UW, she was inspired by her faculty advisor Don Reitz, who was by then a well-known ceramicist. Her interest quickly turned to ceramics and she initiated a new career path as a professional artist…
The Matriculation of the Vessel
There is no doubt that the power of the earth is enmeshed in Barbara Sorensen’s works. There is a tactile quality in all her clay pieces that speak of the cragginess and topography of our environment. Even her Pools and Dunes, although made out of different materials, suggest the envelope of the earth: its currents and vortexes…
Thoughts: Don Reitz
It is always a pleasure to watch a student of yours continue to excel over the years in an experimental way; pushing the envelope, exaggerating shapes, combining dissimilar forms, and using color and texture in an aggressive manner to create objects of significance…
Thoughts: Paul Soldner
From the intimacy of the early Princess Leia forms to the more recent human-sized Pinnacles, Barbara has not only played with scale, but her combination of non-functional forms with geological references have left her work embedded with metaphor…
Thoughts: Rudy Autio
Barbara Sorensen continues to surprise us with her formidable ambition and talent for articulating large and looming forms of paper clay in ceramics. To me it’s an impressive sky-full of shapes! They seem balanced ambiguously, challenging gravity in defiance of an uneasy truce with nature…
Topographies: Barbara Sorensen
During the decades since Barbara Sorensen first felt clay’s quintessentially satisfying tactile and expressive potential as – literally – the Earth, there have been many changes in her field. The old barriers between “fine arts” and “crafts,” already challenged by the emerging American Craft Movement, had been further eroded by the modernist principles of pioneers such as Peter Voulkos and his emphasis on primal expression and process…