Teresa Tolliver. Sitting on the Edge of Reality

About

Tolliver creates hand-built ceramics and utilizes found objects that emerge from her everyday life, as well as craft materials, mass-produced items, and elements she picks up at swap meets. She gathers these objects to construct deeply personal figurative sculptures and wall works that range in scale from hand-held and doll-like, to life-size freestanding figures evocative of the Watts Towers not far from her home, and a locus in her artistic life. As Tolliver contends with identity, place, and history both personal and cultural, she refers to the faces in her figurative work as self-portraiture where she embodies and reconceptualizes her mood, state of being, and biography at the time of creation. “Tolliver’s object-based work and her work as an educator—she has taught for more than two decades in museums, schools, and nonprofit settings—exemplify her commitment to this ethos of world-building,” curator Essence Harden wrote in an essay about the artist’s participation in the Made in L.A. biennial. “Tolliver’s expressive mastery is exhibited in her overall works, her pedagogy, and her ability to morph the mundane into an expansive visual iconography.”