Maura Wright is a Kansas City based artist. Primarily working in earthenware, Wright’s coil built vessels pay homage to historical influences ranging from French Rococo porcelain to Italian fresco painting to American folk art. Bold and colorful patterns are paired with a reverence for romantic classical forms. The resulting pastiche embraces the expressive capabilities of clay. Repetitive perfection achieved in traditional ornament is replaced with a decadent facade that highlights the process of the handmade and the impropriety and insouciance of contemporary culture. Wright’s practice has expanded to include large-scale installations of painted paper and wood depicting the domestic interior.
Wright earned her MFA from the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University in 2018 and a BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute in 2013. She has held residencies at several institutions in the U.S. as well as the International Ceramics Studio in Kecskemet, Hungary and Guldagergaard, International Ceramic Research Center in Skaelskor, Denmark. Most recently she was an artist in residence at the Archie Bray Foundation.
After six years in Montana, she relocated her studio to the midwest during the summer of 2024.
Photography: Will Warasila
Imagine that the Mediterranean coast collided with Florida in a shocking tectonic shift. French Rococo porcelain and Italian majolica pouring into the kitsch beach shops of Sarasota. Maura Wright weds high art to low until we can’t tell the difference, until we feel ourselves acknowledging the staginess of all art, of all life.
The decorative is primarily dissected. Tureens and vessels are draped with laurels, florets, and vignettes. The historically porcelain is purposefully re-crafted in terra cotta, grown more expressive in affect, bulged or distorted. It cares two figs (sometimes literally) about what you think.
The joy is in being the prop master, the art director pulling from the grab bag of historical precedents, uncaring of anachronisms, full of playful spirit. High art begins to feel staged; the art of the stage becomes elevated.
Glazed vases and vessels feel pried from still life. Handles of urns become two dimensional, black and white striped patterns evoke the drafting board or armature. A stray sculptural hand or leg might be lounging about. It’s like there is no fidelity between two- and three-dimensional worlds.
Vessels modeled on trinket boxes are pasted with decals. A sliced cucumber sits juxtaposed to a Grecian urn. Braids, ropes, fruit clusters intertwined with floral and geometric patterns. Patterns may purposefully be water-blotted, blurred. Running ink. It’s faux-feeling, façade.
The pastiche considers the current conversation between craft and high art--the former all about repetition/perfection, the latter about the medium of clay as expressive material.
In installations, backdrops use collage that brings the viewer into the temporal and continental collision--multiple milieu, aesthetic climes. Backdrops sometimes resemble wallpaper patched together from colorful paper cutouts of domestic interiors raucously shuffled about.
Each combination of materials and styles is so diverse, it feels as if each piece has a unique personality who struts and frets an hour on stage. The pleasure of the work comes from deft and shifting angles between the tradition of the past and the impropriety and insouciance of the present moment, from questioning the real and the imitation.