This series is an extension of the midwestern series in its examination of nature "sculpted" within man-made spaces.  The portal is a gate or a window to gaze out of our constructed space or its inverse which gazes back upon ourselves.  They become metaphors for our relationship with the natural world; restricted, contained, and framed.

I choose to work in porcelain specifically because of its ability to reference historical ceramics, dinnerware, sanitaryware, dentistry and decorative arts. The complex and sometimes humorous implications of these connections is the foundation for several bodies of work which explore the role of decorative arts in performing the feat of making the unpalatable palatable. The first is the “Friends, Food and Foes” series which explores the desire to preserve and display animals, idealized portrayals of animals and the use of ornateness and decoration to reconcile our inelegance to present them as food. My interest lies in what the ornate attempts to conceal about the complex relationships we have with animals. For example, the piece "A Civilized Meal" is composed of a slip cast life size rabbit that’s been horizontally sliced on the band saw into 1" pieces. Each piece is then separated with a clay "doily," reassembled and luster glazed. The resulting object challenges the material in terms of delicacy as well as alludes to English Bone China and the sophistication it has transmitted into American households. The process conjures an element of violence that's thinly veiled by the ornate gold and delicate slip extrusion of the doilies.

“Midwestern” is an examination of nature sculpted within manufactured spaces. It meditates on stages of agriculture and nature throughout the seasons as well as development, sprawl, the ideas of neighborhood and ownership and how we shape, sculpt, protect and interact with those pieces of land and water which we may call our own. Introducing constructs such as a fence, a gate or a window to delineate the edges of that space, the works in this series become metaphors for appropriation. I use porcelain slip with colorant in an innovative way to build the landscapes by pouring the colored slip out onto plaster and then constructing with the soft paper thin pieces. They can either be stacked and left as is to reveal the construction technique resembling strata of earth and gradations of color or compressed and rolled out to create a panoramic of colored clay, almost like a painting but with less control over the resulting image. For example, the work "Sprawl" has 9 slip-cast house shapes mounted horizontally on the wall, each "wall-papered" with a rolled out paper thin slice of landscape that connects them each together into one panoramic landscape. The pieces in this series start out as an homage to landscape and beauty and the panoramic views that are so iconic to the Midwest, however the subtext is isolated community and insipid development.

Catherine Wiesener of Wiesener Studios designs, fabricates and installs custom art tile.  Each job is a unique design with unique glazes and custom tile to fit the space with the fewest cuts.