My work features imaginative depictions of women, animals, and plants rendered onto hand-built ceramic objects. It takes storytelling as a meeting point of concurrent and past. The experiences I have had living in the United States since 2017 and the culture I inherited while living in China fuse to form these narrative ceramic objects. Building with clay becomes a metaphoric process that speaks to my adaptation to a new environment, from the frightening to the mundane: intimidation, distortion, excitement, confusion, and eventually, celebration.

Working with ceramic, found objects, and video, I employ the visual forms of folk art as a core vocabulary. Placing craft and moving images in unconventional and absurd relationships with one another, I create an intergrowth of their conventional functions, reflecting on their roles as storytelling props with which we coexist in an uneasy present. —Chenlu Hou

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Born in Shandong, China, Chenlu Hou is a ceramic artist based in Providence, RI. She received her MFA in Ceramic Art from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2019. Chenlu has completed residencies at the Penland School of Craft, the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, and the Archie Bray Foundation. She is currently a visiting assistant professor at Connecticut College and a visiting critic at the Rhode Island School of Design.