Woodstock, NY
Kim Alderman's work with clay began as a teenager on Long Island where she apprenticed in production of utilitarian wares. This early interest evolved into a philosophical and aesthetic search that has been the defining process of her life. Clay is her nurturing force and prima materia.
Alderman's clay work is built up and modeled through pinching, throwing and hand building. As the clay air-dries, she works the surface: cutting, carving, scraping, incising, burnishing, and making marks that further reveal the symbolic content. Once air dry, she applies terra-sigillata slip and then fires, often multiple times. She uses a range of smoke firing techniques that blacken and add flashes of color to the surface in unpredictable ways. Her aesthetics are the processes out of which the forms are created rather than out of aesthetics as an unchangeable or static value. Smoke firing leaves an open doorway between the piece and the inspiring and terrifying potential that is not under control of the artist. The pieces emerge from the firing with an inner consistency and a surface that reflects the mysterious and unbounded space from which they take form.
The Stone that Alderman shapes and molds is a symbol of the Self. This is perhaps why people cannot resist bringing home special stones, and why graves are marked with stones, as if the soul lives on in the physical matter of the stone. This is how the series came to be called, Stopping Time. The markers below allow the person to use the object for a self-created ritual, which can be a doorway to Magical thinking which in turn lifts our awareness of spirit.