The art I love doesn't have to be my taste or my style, but the stuff I know the best... the workaday world objects that give us so much joy.
My name is Annabeth Rosen and I make sculpture. I've always worked in clay.
The art I love doesn't have to be my taste or my style, but the stuff I know the best—like certain things we love so much, like the workaday world objects that give us so much joy. Sometimes I don't even have to go to the museum—I can go to the market and just see the rows and the stacks of things and get fueled by that, and ceramics has a lot of that.
As an artist who makes objects—tangible things—I don't think there's any more satisfaction that exists in the world than making, like, a real thing in the real world that you use. It closes the gap between the visual and the sensual.
You know, at the goddamn Metropolitan Museum, every exquisite example of a treasure—the epitome of greatness in terms of culture and art—exists here. But this doe—she's small and insignificant until you really catch her eye, and then there's this kind of connection. I love to believe the fiction of her—that almost woeful and desperate attempt to replicate something in nature.
One of the most remarkable things about this is that you have two from the same mold. They're fabricated, but each one is different, and it's from the mere influence of the human hand that made it. Someone paid so close attention to the nature of their material that they know how it behaves in different ways. They apply the glaze on the neck differently than they apply the glaze on the body, and if you only had one, you would just think it was an anomaly in the kiln.
I really like the brown one better. There's this cruder, less seductive quality about the brown one, because she's so plain that she's even more powerful. And, you know, we build these mythic things around animals. We see our symbolic selves in them.
I don't think of it in terms of great art. I think of this—and all of the things in the Museum—as how they're useful to me as an artist, what we learn about ourselves from objects, and how culture is propelled forward by these things that we make.
I really don't know why we're compelled as humans to do it, but I'm equally seduced and compelled by it.
