Vince Palacios

I am currently working on a series called Potato Tree with Vines. As this new work progresses, humor and awkwardness are emerging in the completed forms. Each day I work is similar to each night that a comedian or performer does a routine. There are set ideas, techniques, and expectations; but each time something new emerges in response to external stimulus, or circumstance. I love improvisational work! Of course there are things that I’m able to do with forethought and skill, but I’m most interested in those things that emerge in the moment. Unexpected. Surprising. Mostly uncontrolled. I am employing the wheel and handbuilding methods leaving many marks on the surface of the work.

There’s nothing new about pinching and leaving your mark in earthen materials. Humans have been doing this from the very beginning; leaving the record or evidence of their existence, expression, and belief in any given material that they used. It is a form of narcissism; a belief that what you’re saying is worth preserving. In this work that I’ve been doing, there is an almost haptic quality. it’s a language not composed of words, rather a composition of marks and bumps and stretching and pressing. In the end a story is being told, a form emerges; a truth is expressed.

I call the lumps or bulbous forms potatoes on my work but It doesn’t matter if you call them lumps, or bumps, or clumps, or tumors or potatoes, or whatever; these forms have always found their way into my work and have continued to show that humor has always played a significant role in my work from the very beginning. There is a sense of awkwardness or out of place, of protruding or protrusion that creates a feeling of awkwardness. My goal is not to cause viewers to feel awkward, rather, To personally reflect on the sense of being out of place and finding a way of fitting in. The recent exhibition of Philip Guston’s work has help me to re-focus on that quality of awkwardness and humor in my work.

-- Vince Palacios

Vince Palacios has been working in the field of ceramic art since 1988. Palacios received his Masters of Ceramic Art from Alfred University and his BFA in ceramics at California State University at Long Beach. He now serves as Professor of the Ceramics Department at El Camino College in Torrance California. He came to El Camino College in 2011 after teaching for six years at Western Illinois University and ten years before that at California State University, Long Beach. He has shown his work nationally and internationally and is included in a number of important private collections as well as prominent museum collections. Palacios continues to exhibit his work and has developed a unique approach to the use of raw glass and ceramic materials as a means of crafting intricate narratives addressing geological process, pyroclastic interaction, and heat/chemical reactions.