Sculpting Emotion

from ArtDiction Spring 2024

Ecological Installations

“For me to come into my own creative space took a lot of psychological work during a 30-year career practicing law,” says Chris Corson, an artist based in Maryland, USA. “I had started making sculpture by the time I retired, but it still took years after I began to exhibit before I could admit to being an artist. It is truly never too late.”

Chris shares that his father grew up in the Depression, and his life was a constant internal struggle between needing to have steady employment and his single-minded drive when at home to succeed at magazine illustration. “He did, but at great cost to his family. I learned that being an artist was bad, and the creative sensibilities I inherited from him got walled off,” Chris says. It wasn’t until his early 60s that he accepted himself as an artist.

Chris’ career in art started with adult art classes for stress relief and, as time went on, a serious need to grapple with and understand a lot of bottled-up feelings. “Life drawing was my epiphany — seeing and perceiving how the body internalizes emotions and unerringly expresses them,” he says. “When clay entered the picture some time later, I already knew that I wanted to explore human emotion at its most basic body level.”

Chris went on to learn the fundamentals of hand building from talented teachers in classes and workshops, and still benefits from watch- ing other people work. “But my personal drive to make large, structurally complex, and increasingly expressive figures was my own, and I developed my own forms and techniques for making them. Clay rewards the effort to learn it, and there is no limit.”

Working with clay became a natural fit for Chris, as he has a strong spatial sense. He shares that the human body always expresses itself in the round, and inner emotions and life experiences always show in how we sit, stand, and move. “I started exploring this oneness of body and emotion by making simple torsos that were open at the shoulders, as literal and metaphoric containers,” Chris recalls. “As I progressed to making complete figures in often complicated poses, my content was turning toward a profound self-inquiry about my own emotions and their expression. For me to do a pose, it had to feel significant somehow within my own body, even if I did not know just what it was.”

Chris adds that making a figure in that pose became a process of flowing those sensations out through his arms and hands and into the clay, embodying the formerly inchoate in a separate human form that could give him perspective. “My figures showed me to myself by manifesting externally what had been inside me. Now that I have come to know myself better, I am able to reach inside with conscious intention, in order to embody issues that are important to me: recovery, growth, relationship and statements that I want to make about humanity and the world.”

“I believe that within myself — and everyone — is a shared experience of universal humanity with its full range of hopes and imperfections. I think that our shared humanity is what enables empathy and understanding,” Chris says. He adds that many of his best works are essentially about vulnerability, often through a figure trying in vain to defend against exposure. “But we are always exposed in the world, and we survive and thrive. I have long concluded that vulnerability, and especially the capacity to own it and let others see it, is true strength.”

Chris also believes that true human relationship takes mutually recognizing and accepting the less than perfect, and that it is imperfection that shows our humanity and opens us to others. “When people find emotional resonance in my work, I think it is because the experience has touched what is personal and maybe even universal within them,” he says. “My involvement with figures is done when they are complete, but if I have been true to myself in making them, they can go out into the world with messages of compassion, understanding, acceptance and humanity. I want them to do that work.”

Chris finds inspiration by walking into an empty studio, because “everything is possible.” He adds the same is true of clay. “It is earthy, tactile, malleable, robust and delicate. An old metaphor is that humans are made of clay, and I think that I prove it every time I take a shapeless lump and make an expressive and communicative sculptural figure,” he says.

“I am in awe of artists like Ai Wei Wei, who live and express their art in every moment and breath. Artists in my Pantheon have transcended context with new, coherent vision and integrity: Cezanne, Matisse, Kandinsky, Jasper Johns to name a few,” Chris says. He is also inspired by Hellenistic bronzes, Donatello, Rodin, Ma- rino Marini, Henry Moore. “I am energized by other artists finding their own ways to express what is important to them. It is up to me to find my own.”

Chris says a lot of work needs incubation even when he has strong feeling about what he wants to make. “Something needs to coalesce inside. But however I get there, it then becomes a process of doing whatever I need to do with form and technique to bring it forth.” When it’s time to create, Chris uses his hands to shape the clay walls of his figures from the inside as well as the outside. “The best tools for clay are hands. Other clay tools tend to be very simple: ribs to smooth contours and shapers of various kinds to create surface features. I like to construct my forms on banding wheels (like heavy-duty lazy Susans), so that I can make sure that a piece is working in the round.”

Now that Chris has found his ways through art to express his own vulnerability, personhood, and his piece of universal humanity, he wants to flow it outward. “Besides sending my pieces into the world, it is increasingly important to me to connect personally and constructively with others in my community,” Chris says. As such, he teaches ceramic sculpture as part of Greenbelt, MD Community Center’s rich program of art activities. “I get great satisfaction from being part of creating open and accepting environments for others to find and express what is important to them.”

Visit Chris at his studio in the Greenbelt Community Center, open every Spring and Fall during the Center’s Open Studio Tours or by appointment. You can also see more of Chris’ art at chriscorsonsculpture.com, and follow him on Instagram: @chriscorsonartist.