Tamara Shores started in the field of graphic design in her teens, making t-shirt designs for the local weight-lifting gym and serving as art director for the high school yearbook. Those were the last days before Macintosh computers, when they did paste-up using ChartPak fills, graphic tape, and rub-off letters, and a PMT machine to convert photos to half-tones. After a 30+ year career in graphic design, animation, and creative direction, she has turned her attention back to hand-made artifacts that explore the objects of her lifelong attention. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from Boise State Univeristy and has published short stories in many literary journals.
artist statement
After a lifetime paying attention to and working in letterform, design, language, and story, I am now exploring these {objects/methods} in ceramic form. The pieces contemplate interconnection, dependence, and exclusion, and examine two main themes: kinship and language.
kinship
Kinship
I've been contemplating the benefits and dangers of kinship--family, friends, community, groups--and how the same social and biological forces that bind us together are also at the root of what causes us to exclude and attack. Note how oxytocin, the "bonding hormone," is also at work in out-group conflict. (Behavioral Biologist Robert Sapolsky has been a big influence on these contemplations). Kinship can be tender, precious, bittersweet, complicated, fleeting, and enduring.
language (un)known
Languages {un}Known
Typography and letterform are objects of communication as well as methods. We move through the world taking in language, sometimes in forms that merely infer the possibility of meaning. Further, languages unknown to viewer can be presented in abstracted and graphic form that is so removed from comprehension (to the English language speaker) as to be mere objects. As a (slightly) durable material, ceramic invites us to contemplate the provisional qualities of communication and understanding.