Hope Rovelto

Artist Statement

My work involves contemporary issues in my life as well as those in the world around me. The individual and social topics I choose to depict are global issues that not only serve as a method in which to deal with my own frustrations with my past, present and future, but also serve as a way for viewers to think about frustrations in their own experience.

I am fascinated with depicting human experience and have often used chairs as a way in which to do so. I see chairs as a metaphor of human life and am attracted to the sense of emptiness that an unoccupied chair creates.

I have also explored similar ideas using mixed media installations and prints. The specific material used is chosen in support of the ultimate implication behind the work. I bring together objects that trigger personal experience and are familiar enough to invite common memories and connections within the viewer. My desire is to provide viewers with the ability to see these images through my perspective, while also allowing them to create their own insight through the broad and slightly ambiguous nature of the final piece.

Most recently, I have created a body of work that comments on the current health system in the United States. One recent piece from this body of work includes “USA Health Care” where a life sized porcelain wheelchair sits upon a map of the United States made of hand carved “money” tiles. Another piece is the “Rx: Money.” In this piece, an acrylic money symbol is filled with porcelain pill bottles.

I am also exploring what it means to make “ceramic” art as it serves both function and concept. I have been investigating what both my and the viewer’s perception of clay is through recent pieces, such as in “Function vs. Concept,” which presents a 25 pound bag of clay juxtaposed with 25 one-pound wheel thrown cups.

I am influenced by american culture, current media and politics, and what I view as the degradation of the human experience through social and environmental poisons which plague our world. I feel that it is my job as an artist to not only explore these ideas but also present them, provoking an awareness response.

-- Hope Rovelto

Bio

Hope Rovelto earned her BFA in sculpture from Maine College of Art and her MFA in Ceramics from Rochester Institute of Technology. She is most currently working as an Admission Counselor for Maine College of Art and an Artist Member at Pickwick Independence Studio’s in Portland ME. She was teaching Art History II at Philadelphia University, Collaborative Studio, Core studies Found and Fabricated courses at The University of the Arts, Philadelphia and Visual Studies 3-D at Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia.

She has taught Image transfer on clay workshops at Guldagergaard International Ceramic Research Center, Denmark, The Clay Studio, and Abington Art Center in Philadelphia. Hope has participated/taught at Watershed Center for Ceramic Arts in Maine, Arrowmont School of Craft in Tennessee, Penland School of Craft in North Carolina, Oxbow in Michigan. She has been a resident artist at Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts in Maine, Greenwich House Pottery in New York and a fellow at Wheaton Arts Center for Glass in New Jersey. She is on the Board of Directors at Watershed and is currently the owner of Little Chair Printing a custom screen-printing shop in Portland ME.