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Exhibitions:
City of Ceramics, Sèvres, 12 September 2012 – January 14, 2013
Museum of Decorative Arts, Bordeaux, February 28 – May 28, 2013
La Piscine, Roubaix, October 2013 – January 2014
Born in Canada to American parents, but resident in France from a young age, Kristin McKirdy drank from the sources of the different cultures she found herself confronted with. She studied art history in Paris and fine arts at UCLA. Her vocation as a ceramist was a means of achieving a free and enriching synthesis from sometimes antagonistic influences.
Her professional journey is lived as a series of challenges and questions. An in-depth knowledge of the history of her discipline and a perfect mastery of her technique have conditioned the development of an original and powerful body or work.
While remaining convinced that her art had to remain anchored in these traditions, she learned from ceramic artists, notably Adrian Saxe and Kenneth Price, that the time had come for ceramics to free itself from its confinement to the world of decorative arts and that it should make its way into the great nebula of plastic arts.
A stranger to the rearguard debate which is shaking up the European scene, she builds her career on faith and an absolute detachment from essential qualities, to transform any existential or metaphysical worry into fertile ground, and the origin of creation. Both strong and fragile, Kristin McKirdy delivers scholarly and spontaneous work, rigorous and sensitive. Playing with virtuosity's universal archetypes (vases, cups, bowls, amphoras), her hands give birth to pieces whose measured biomorphism is a vector of sense and emotion.
The City of Ceramics gives a free rein to Kristin McKirdy to make a historical connection between her work's aesthetic and certain preserved pieces in national collections.
A monographic exhibition, “Kristin McKirdy: Twenty years of Creation” presents both the creations from her four years of residence in Sèvres between 2008 and 2012 and a selection of the most representative pieces from the last twenty years, from private collections.
Alongside the exhibition at Sèvres, the creations made during Kristin McKirdy's residency will be on sale at the Parisian gallery of Sèvres, at the Palais Royal. The Pierre Marie Giraud galleries in Brussels and Jousse in Paris will also present pieces.
• 23 x 30.5 cm
• 200 pages
• 340 color illustrations
• Hardback cover
• Bilingual French-English edition
• ISBN: 978-2-9155-4247-9
Text in French only