Breana Ferreira (feh-heh-dah) (she/her) was born and raised in Southern California and received her BFA in Ceramics in the Spring of 2022 from the University of North Texas. Her process integrates traditional ceramic practices with the two-dimensional arts to develop personal and cultural narrative through sculpted still-life’s and utilitarian form.
Since graduating, Breana has worked as an educator, assistant, and resident artist in association with the American Museum of Ceramic Art in Southern California and through the Schools of Art and Craft at Penland in North Carolina, Arrowmont in Tennessee, and Haystack in Maine. Breana is currently working as a long-term resident artist in Red Lodge, Montana through the Red Lodge Clay Center.
Artist Bio
My practice fixates on ceramic objects as active participants in routine and ritual, as conduits for introspection, and as vessels for personal and cultural narrative. The work reflects most on a balanced diet of awe and anxiety that fuels my fascination with the ways in which delight and doubt differentiate the days. Particularly preoccupied with the bittersweet and the mundane, my focus is on recording fond moments of quiet intimacy and simple joys susceptible to being lost from memory with time.
Through the celebratory practices of adornment and self-preservation, I expand upon these collected moments and memories through both sculpted still-life’s and utilitarian form. More often than not, I embrace maximalist tendencies indulging in rich layers of texture, color, and imagery utilizing both pattern and iconography to adorn form in the same ways we adore our environments and our bodies . Sculpture and vessel alike, my objects are contemplations and memories crafted into symbols of personal and cultural identity that look within at my multicultural roots, familial relationships, and around at the landscapes I call home.
Artist Statement
Craft & Concept
The collaged contrapposto cups are a series I've been developing for the past five years. Integrating my love for the visual arts with that of traditional clay practices, this ongoing body of work is the exploration of print, collage, and pattern to craft rich tactile ceramics. My fixation with the cup form is out of recognition for its independence from the table, its tendency to act as an accessory, and its accessibility as functional and collectible sculpture. Every cup is a carefully curated extension of myself with a consideration for both function and aesthetic.
In reference to the self and the body, each piece begins with the silhouette of a form based in softness and symmetry. When distorted with decorative impressions, its material response is perfectly reminiscent of the ways in which our environments, bodies, and psyche record time. Each form is painted and printed in direct response to these foundational irregularities adorning a pot in the same ways we accentuate our own features. Contributing to the tradition of the pot as a vessel for personal and cultural narrative, I document the rhythms, repetition, and routines observed within my own life; A chair acts as symbol of home and idle energy, a step stool a symbol of productivity and ambition, teeth to symbolize vanity and anxiety, and pressed botany as a symbol of femininity and practices of preservation.
These loaded compositions are crafted with the intent to overwhelm the form and stimulate the senses. To me, these pots are mementos of days spent consumed by a balanced diet of anxiety and awe. They are an intimate reminder of the worries that plague me and the joys I embrace despite them. With each iteration, they evolve in the same nuanced ways I do.
I started this wiffle ball/polka pot series of work about a year ago during a time where I found myself in deep appreciation and need for the comforts and pleasures of simplicity. It's an ongoing series quite literally inspired by the simple joy of finding an abandoned wiffle ball on the streets of Chicago during a bad day.
For me this body of work exists as an escape into a place of play and lightness with a focal point on iconography and pattern. It serves as a personal creative rest from the exploration of maximalist ornamentation with the intent to embrace a simpler kind of play in the studio.
You could say this is my version of minimal.