"Place," a piece by Jennifer Forsberg

"Portrait Of A Man," by Gert Germeraad

3/12/12

Contemporary Ceramic Sculpture Artists To Speak, Conduct Workshops At SLU

CANTON - Gert Germeraad and Jennifer Forsberg, both sculptors of contemporary ceramics who work in Sweden, will conduct a workshop and give talks at St. Lawrence University, in free public events made possible by the Hovey/Brown Endowment for the Arts.

Back-to-back lectures the artists will be on Wednesday, March 21, at 7 p.m. in Room 123 of the Griffiths Arts Center. Forsberg's talk, "From Woodfired Blobs to Plastic Clouds," will address "artistic choices, dead-end roads, challenges and curiosity." Germeraad's talk titled is "Face to Face, and the Consequences of the Art of Reading Faces." He states, "For many years people have tried to read and interpret the faces of the people they meet. The ancient Greeks had their theories on bodily fluids like blood, slime and bile which would determine basic character in humans. Later on, people constructed theories on how to read character from facial features, like lumps on the head, the size of the nose, the placement of the ears or the color of the skin. All this would help to determine The Other. From this it was a small step to theories of race and character which was practiced in Europe and America by the Nazis and eugenic movements." Germeraad has investigated the old theories of facial features and character by making several series of portrait sculptures in clay.

Both artists will conduct a public workshop, encouraging everyone to watch them work, on Friday, March 23, from 9 to 11:30 a.m., in Room 10 of the Griffiths Arts Center.

Forsberg is a studio artist living in the south of Sweden. She has travelled and exhibited nationally as well as internationally. Forsberg mainly works with ceramics and is especially interested in public spaces. Germeraad is a studio artist from the Netherlands, living and working in the south of Sweden. Throughout his career, he been interested in human relations and portrait sculpture and has been working with portraits as a main topic the last 15 years.