Eva Champagne
About the Artist
Eva Champagne is an American artist who grew up in Hong Kong, one of the great cultural melting pots of the world. She received her B.A. in Studio Art from Humboldt State University and completed Post-Baccalaureate study at the University of Florida. In 2009 she earned her M.F.A. from the University of Montana-Missoula. Since then, she has been a resident artist at AIR Vallauris in France, Guldagergaard International Ceramic Research Center in Denmark, Watershed Center for Ceramic Arts in Maine, Red Lodge Clay Center and The Clay Studio of Missoula in Montana, and most recently at Gaya Ceramic Art Center in Bali, Indonesia. As an educator, she teaches successfully in both the academic and workshop setting. Ceramic topics include wheel throwing, hand-building, soda firing at low, mid and highfire temperatures, low-fire ceramic surface techniques, as well as thematic sculptural subjects. Other media courses include beginning and advanced drawing, figure drawing, painting, 2D and 3D design and understanding visual arts. For the 2012-13 academic year, she was visiting artist and adjunct professor at Gulf Coast State College in Panama City, Florida where she taught drawing and painting. Currently she is adjunct professor at Santa Fe College in Gainesville, Florida, which is ranked in the top ten of community colleges nationwide for the second year in a row. Her work is shown nationally and internationally, and is included in several permanent collections.
Artist Statement
A radical unity supports the vast diversity of appearances in nature, making strict categorizations such as animal, vegetable or mineral superficial at best. The unifying element has been called energy, or as Emerson put it, “thought is the common origin.” This guiding principle, combined with a life spent by the sea and an enduring fascination with nature’s forms and processes has resulted in my current body of work. By synthesizing abstracted formal references to animals, plants and geologic sources, I create intentionally ambiguous ceramic sculptures that exist in the fluid margin between categories. My aim is toward something composite that will challenge the habitual presumption that the object must be either one thing or another in favor of a more open “both/and/maybe” interpretation of form. Through this investigation I hope to share my curiosity about the likeness that pervades the variety in life.
“We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole, of which these are the shining parts, is the soul.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Over-Soul”