Saratoga Clay Arts Center’s Schacht Gallery presents UNFOLD, a duo exhibition featuring ceramic works by two Saratoga Springs, New York artists - SCAC director and founder Jill Fishon-Kovachick and mixed media artist Anne Francey. The exhibition will open on February 10th with an opening reception from 5-7pm and continue through March 9, 2024. Light refreshments will be served. Admission is free. The exhibition will also open in our online Schacht Gallery SHOP at 5pm on February 10th.
In UNFOLD, the artists will explore the ceramic medium each in their unique way, one by erupting large and small ceramic vessels and creating volume from the inside out, the other by painting with colorful glazes on flat ceramic shapes assembled in surprising configurations. Both convey a similar feeling of fluidity and gestural expression unfolding and conversing with other forces.
About her work, SCAC director and found Jill Fishon-Kovachick states, “The world in which we live brings us challenges each day, varying in subject and intensity. In my experience, as we grow older, we accept these challenges with worry, strength and dignity. Women in particular, whether we speak our minds or keep our thoughts private, experience unique struggles. The clay forms that I create are brought forth by those challenges - the destruction and reconstruction of ourselves. They are my response to what God gives to us and how we manage it. As people and as women, it is important for all of us to remember that we can communicate and process our everyday experiences through art, which allows others to do the same. In this way, we honor our efforts in staying strong through the different passages of life.”
Anne Francey states, “’We tell ourselves stories in order to live.’ ~ Joan Didion. My ceramic pieces are diaries of sorts, exploring and assembling spans of time, places, moods, occurrences and observation of nature. By looking for the delicate balance between fluidity and geometry, gesture and design, I reflect on the need to find sense and order in the events that punctuate our lives. In response, viewers create their personal narrative by inventing their own dance of the eye, linking various visual elements into a unique choreography.
Jill received her MFA in ceramics from Vermont College and her B.S. at Skidmore College with a concentration in ceramics. She spent seventeen years teaching for Special Programs at Skidmore College. Jill exhibits her work both locally and regionally and is the Founder and Director of Saratoga Clay Arts Center.
Anne Francey is a visual artist who works in painting, ceramics and video, and shows her work in the U.S. and abroad. She exhibits her work regularly at the Carrie Haddad gallery in Hudson. A native of Switzerland, she attended the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Lausanne before moving to New York where she earned an MFA from Hunter College before settling in Saratoga Springs NY, where she has taught visual art at Skidmore college and other institutions. She often travels to Switzerland and to Tunisia, where she finds inspiration in the centuries old Islamic art of tile painting. She has been the recipient of several grants from the New York State Council of the Arts for community art projects, and was awarded a 2021-22 Fulbright scholar award. She divides her time between large participatory art projects involving hundreds of participants and her studio practice.