GRETCHEN EWERT

Gretchen Ewert is a multimedia artist who works in clay, paper, canvas and printmaking which can all inform a single piece. In clay she is known for her animal sculptures which look to art for historical references, but also draw from actual observations in the wild. She is an innovator in creating surfaces that use both ceramic and non-ceramic materials after firing. The work is hand built mostly out of earthenware. Some of the materials are bone, horn, metal leafs and gold. 

     A second ongoing body of work is sculpted paper, called Paper, Skin, Air using recycled materials, clay parts, pen and ink, and polythene. The pieces are around 55" at the most and attached to the wall.

     A third body uses under paintings digitally scanned and manipulated from textiles overlaid with dense webs of pen and ink stipple using technical pens and colored pencil. The pieces are generally in the 38" x 45”  range.

     Ewert lives and works in Arroyo Hondo outside of Taos. She is a Northern New Mexico native but has led a peripatetic life being in the world. She is in collections of nine museums including UNM Harwood in Taos, Albuquerque Museum, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. She received a number of awards including a National Endowment '88 for her work in clay and a Pollock Krasner Fellowship for her work in paper '04-'05. She taught for years at Santa Fe Clay and held the first workshop there in '94.