Tricia Cline was born in Sacramento, California in 1956. As a self-taught sculptor, she has been working for over 25 years from direct observation of female and animal forms. Her highly detailed porcelain sculptures are complex metaphors describing humans’ relationship to animals and to themselves as… animals. Cline’s method of observation without mental interpretation is influenced by the writings of psychologist James Hillman, who in his book Blue Fire describes a dream featuring a great black snake. Interpreting the meaning of the snake upon awakening (or restricting the vast unknown to what is known) will kill the image, cutting off any path to a transcendent reality.
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"At age 27 I was living in a small town in Iowa, where I worked as a cook in a pizza parlor. In the evening, I would usually walk my dog, and as people passed by, they would look down at my dog and say: 'Hi Zoie,' and then look up at me and say: 'Hi Pizza Girl.' It became so common that it forced me to realize, 'I do not want to be Pizza Girl at 30.'”
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"I locked myself up in my tiny rented room and made lists of things I ´liked.´ ... Somewhere on the lists I wrote 'clay figures,' because I remembered feeling thrilled when I saw a tiny picture in the back of a magazine of a delicately sculptured porcelain female figure. So I bought a ball of clay for 5 dollars in Iowa City and I sat in my room"
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"I wanted to do the figure, but couldn’t afford a live model, so I bought three floor length mirrors and studied the female figure sculpting myself with mirrors.
At that time I was very influenced by the psychologist James Hillman. I learned a great deal about the life of an image. He describes in his book Blue Fire, a dream, where suddenly a great black snake shows up, if the dreamer, upon awakening, decides to interpret the meaning of the snake, she kills it. So the relationship with the image is lost, because the Unknown has been limited to only what is Known." -
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"People that have never made art or stopped making it for whatever reason are amazed at the transcendent power of direct observation ... That sounds so obvious and childishly simplistic. But most people don’t do it. They usually consciously or mostly unconsciously sculpt ideas of what they are looking at instead of what they are actually looking at."
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"My own experience of making art is the same as a student that walks into the classroom for the first time, it’s a universal experience ... Art has been glorified as a product of the ego, as a personal revelation, but this couldn’t be less true. In my own experience in my studio and teaching people, making art is the basic human experience you can have."
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"A dog can run at full speed, with a distinct scent or sound altering its direction. The legs, the nose, the ears of the dog are all part of its function, its bliss. It naturally lives in its bliss just by virtue of being. When an animal recognizes another animal it reads with an instinctual eye the character in the form—the essential nature in the form before it. Its text is not a concept about what it’s looking at but a full-bodied response"
