Analuisa Corrigan

Hi Jesús! I’m so excited too! Thanks for such a complimentary introduction, we need to chat more often. If I could transform into one of my pieces it would be into a floor lamp. Something with a flowy shade, made of an exciting fabric and a reactive glaze. I like that floor lamps stand alone, take up space and they have the ability to influence that space’s mood through light.

I chose to explore ceramics towards the end of my senior year at Parsons where I had been studying Communication Design and was basically married to Adobe Indesign. I took design history electives that focused heavily on mid-century modernist furniture and sculpture, which really made me crave a material that was tactile, a material that I could work with more intuitively, something that wasn’t two-dimensional and only existed on my laptop. I started hand-building and learning the wheel in my free time and was immediately hooked.

Clay is the most complicated, stubborn, rewarding and exciting material I’ve ever worked with. I remember when I first started working with clay, I really had to reckon with these ideas of detachment and limitations in my practice. I would spend 15-plus hours on a piece, just to have it collapse, crack or explode in the kiln. The first time I built a ceramic chair, which took about a week and a half, I left it to dry and didn’t wrap it well enough. The legs started drying before the seat and the backing, so they began to contract, crack and almost completely break off from the rest of the chair. This in itself was devastating, but I then had to take a mallet and quite literally smash the chair into bits so I could recycle the nearly 100 lbs of clay. To spend that much physical and emotional energy on something, to then actively destroy it, is a very unique and unsettling feeling. With clay, you have to detach yourself from your desired outcome, release your expectations, and instead, try to prize and admire the practice and the passage. I know I’m probably making working with clay sound awful, but truthfully it’s the self-willed qualities that make me love it so much. It’s intimate, gratifying, impersonal, and traumatic all at once.

Obviously, it’s no news to anyone that women have always been used physically as inspiration, admiration and idolisation within fine art and specifically by male artists. We’ve all made the observations that the female body adorns most canvases and sculptures in classic art museums, so it’s definitely interesting and frustrating to consider how many of the artists shown are not females, but are we surprised? Many people who are much smarter than me have analysed these ideological foundations in art history, but just for the sake of optimism, I’ll say that I am excited by the current and very necessary representation of female artists and I can only hope that number continues to increase. This question actually reminds me of the Judy Chicago exhibit I recently saw at The New Museum, The City Of Ladies, which completely blew me away. It was a solo exhibition that was curated as an “introspective” rather than a retrospective and it displayed Chicago’s work alongside artworks and archival materials by almost 90 women and genderqueer artists. It is really inspiring and historically informative to see the works of these women, some of whom have never been acknowledged as artists, and to see a glimpse into women’s history through these works, many of which would be considered “minor arts.” I think about this idea of “minor arts” often and how these undervalued disciplines are presented and perceived. I always come back to considering the space things exist in, the intent behind the work, and how powerful and important it is to place these pieces in a space where they can be thoughtfully received as fine art. 

Thanks! I honestly had so much fun making them. They were designed as a nod to the rise of the opulent and supremely elegant vanity tables from the late 17th century. Each piece is bespoke and made of ceramic and melted glass. I’m obsessed with Italian commesso pendants and tried to incorporate similar elements to imitate gems. I really explored a childlike corner of my practice with these pieces because I wanted them to feel playful. I named it The Vanity Collection because I wanted to celebrate and indulge in self-adoration instead of criticising it. I’m so sick of this idea that self-loving should be deemed as a negative, egotistical quality. As women we get picked apart enough as is, so why not honor moments when we gaze at ourselves adoringly in an overly decorative pink mirror with bows?

Louise Bourgeois and Alvin Ailey are definitely top two.

I think it completely depends on the intent behind the design. For me personally, within lighting design, function plays a massive role in most of my work, so I typically focus on functionality before bringing myself to it conceptually. Different pieces evoke different emotions for different reasons - I’m not sure I believe there’s a specific quality that makes a piece good or bad.

There isn’t a specific period in design history that I look to for inspiration. I tend to find the most inspiration through mediums that have nothing to do with ceramic art: fabric, flowers, films, and even mundane objects. A world that I always come back to for inspiration is theatre. I come from a long line of theatre stagehands and spent most of my adolescence backstage with carpenters, costume and lighting designers, dancers, choreographers, etc. That is, without a doubt, the most inspiring and creatively rich space I’ve ever been in.

Lily’s work is stunning. It’s wildly different from my own, so it’s very impressive and inspiring to see how she executes these designs and marries materials of clay, water, stone, etc. For House and Garden, I was inspired by my great aunt’s living room in Mexico; everything was welcoming and beautiful but also covered in clear plastic. I always felt that space to be an interesting juxtaposition of feeling and material, which I wanted to explore myself through ceramics. The space I designed was meant to feel welcoming and domestic, while simultaneously feeling cold, ornate and fragile.

In their own home! I recently launched the Scoop Lamp with Wooj. They're a petite 3D-printed version of a ceramic fixture I designed for Stroll Garden and it makes me happy to create something accessible that more people can take home with them.