Kate Roberts

         My practice is a meditation on time and its role in the decay of objects and memories.  Inspiration is drawn from historical objects, the architecture around me, or a personal relationship.  My processes are repetitive and labor intensive; I draw, construct, and weave using materials to depict fleeting, fragile moments and to examine the temporary physicality of an object or idea.  The physical properties of my materials - parched, cracked clay and vitreous porcelain - at once delicate and dense emulate states of decay in nature yet are built and mended by hand. This contradiction, of meticulously crafting the ravages of time, is at the foundation of my work.  Accumulation and deterioration; solidity and transparency; entrapment and protection; order and chaos are material and organizational polarities that cause the work to teeter on the edge of viability in a perpetual state of in-between. This push and pull, back and forth, parallels our relationship with the natural world.  Nature bares life, nature takes life away, humanity resists, but nature in the end has the final say.  And without question the cycle begins again.  In questioning the consequences, I create work to find the beauty and the unrest in this temporal state.