Althea Fultz
Bio
Althea Fultz grew up in Santa Barbara, and started doing pottery and ceramics at her local city college. By encouragement of her professors, she went to CalSate Long Beach and received her BFA in Ceramics. In 2020 covid hit, and she spent an awkward six months making drawings in a shack in her parents back yard. This radically expanded her thinking, independence and breadth as an artist. After that she attended University of Washington, where she earned her MFA in sculpture, and expanded to make both large and small scale installations, drawings, map, cartoons, and some undertone of ceramics. Now she operates a private studio in Greenlake, and a small ceramics studio called Sumtimes Studio where she offers studio time by the hour, memberships and private lessons.
As an artist, Althea is a omnivore, munching on many different ideas, ethoi and misteries. This has probably been due to a somewhat erratic life. Or perhaps the other way around.
Artist Statement
My practice channels the patterns or habits that are omnipresent in my perceptual world. It's a mapping of repetitive action. It is the echo of a sound, the topographic map of a terrain, and the large mess a small animal leaves in its wake. So it is in a sense representational, but not representative of particularities so much as the pattern that a cluster of particularities inevitably manifest.
By creating this evidence for individual action I can enter into some sort of argument with others (and myself) as to whether such a thing exists, and what is its mechanism, and why, and what is its place in our current world of shrinking dissimilarities. In the cultural landscape I find myself in, this has come to be an important discussion internally. Whether it emerges to be something more generally useful is for the audience to determine. Value is determined externally, as action is determined internally: such is the burden of being an individual and a collective.
The objects I make are necessary detritus to this research, and range from welded sculptural installations to smol beasts made of plastilina. There are also, sumtimes, rabits.
Practically speaking, this work mines the specifics of my own life: it’s honestly the only thing I feel I have an incontestable right to: I've earned it, seeing as I have to live it. The fact that there are rabits and other mysteries is only to be accounted for if one dare account for the general Misterie of being:
It is a rabits job to do what Rabits do
Amd sometimes Rabits do some things they rue:
I can’t remember all the time
That every poem is not a rhyme
And when the song is out of tune
I tend to run too soon
And wail upon a waning moon
And when the flowers fade
I forget I picked them on a raid
So forgive me a little for making Art a lot
Because it’s balsam for an aching "ought"
Please wait, it may take sometime ...
1-Always Use "Landscape" mode Layout in print settings.
2-Use default margins.
Althea Fultz
My practice channels the patterns or habits that are omnipresent in my perceptual world. It's a mapping of repetitive action. It is the echo of a sound, the topographic map of a terrain, and the large mess a small animal leaves in its wake. So it is in a sense representational, but not representative of particularities so much as the pattern that a cluster of particularities inevitably manifest.
By creating this evidence for individual action I can enter into some sort of argument with others (and myself) as to whether such a thing exists, and what is its mechanism, and why, and what is its place in our current world of shrinking dissimilarities. In the cultural landscape I find myself in, this has come to be an important discussion internally. Whether it emerges to be something more generally useful is for the audience to determine. Value is determined externally, as action is determined internally: such is the burden of being an individual and a collective.
The objects I make are necessary detritus to this research, and range from welded sculptural installations to smol beasts made of plastilina. There are also, sumtimes, rabits.
Practically speaking, this work mines the specifics of my own life: it’s honestly the only thing I feel I have an incontestable right to: I've earned it, seeing as I have to live it. The fact that there are rabits and other mysteries is only to be accounted for if one dare account for the general Misterie of being:
It is a rabits job to do what Rabits do
Amd sometimes Rabits do some things they rue:
I can’t remember all the time
That every poem is not a rhyme
And when the song is out of tune
I tend to run too soon
And wail upon a waning moon
And when the flowers fade
I forget I picked them on a raid
So forgive me a little for making Art a lot
Because it’s balsam for an aching "ought"