User:Eabeasley/sandbox

[SIDEBAR]

[PHOTO of Michael]

Michael Sherrill

Born: October 27, 1954 (age 65)

Providence, Rhode Island

Nationality: United States

Known for: Sculpture

Awards: 2010 United States Artists Wingate Fellow

[Art images with captions]

[MAIN TEXT BODY]

Michael Sherrill (born October 27, 1954) is an American sculptor who is also a designer and producer of tools for artists working in the ceramic medium. Primarily self-taught, Sherrill’s early work in the 1970s and 1980s focused on creating functional pieces in clay before turning to sculptural artwork in porcelain and metal in the 1990s. [CM p.30] In 1997, he founded Mudtools, a line of hand tools for artists working in clay. [CM p.36] Sherrill lives and works in Bat Cave, North Carolina. [TN]

Life

Born in Providence, Rhode Island to Betty Church Byrum and James William Sherrill, a machinist and self-taught inventor. Sherrill was raised in Charlotte, North Carolina, where his family moved when Sherrill was three years old. [MSR p. 27, p. 34][ACM] A diagnosis of dyslexia when Sherrill was a boy affirmed in him a natural desire to learn through using his hands, often by taking apart objects to see how they functioned. [TN] While growing up, Sherrill had access to his father’s workshop, enabling him, from a young age, to gain familiarity with the form and function of tools and heavy equipment. [MSR p. 34]

At sixteen years of age, a summer spent with his grandfather in Gastonia, North Carolina, proved to be an influential period for Sherrill. He spent his months there working with textile machinery at a local mill, where he gained an appreciation for the beauty of functional objects; he developed a particular fascination for objects touched regularly by human hands. Sherrill credits his grandfather for helping him to gain an appreciation for humble objects, such as oxen yokes and leather harnesses, as well as for the natural world. [MSR p. 35; TN]

In 1974, after spending a year at community college, Sherrill relocated from Charlotte to the mountains of western North Carolina, where he started producing functional salt-glazed pottery. [MSR p. 28] Sherrill lives and maintains a 5,000 square foot working studio in Bat Cave, located in Henderson County. [ACM]

Work

Since 1974, Sherrill has created work in clay, including multimedia sculptures incorporating porcelain, metal, and glass. Sherrill was influenced in his early work by the North Carolina folk pottery tradition as well as by artists at Penland School of Crafts [TN] [CM p.30]. Over the course of his career, Sherrill has experimented widely with various techniques and materials in the clay medium, notably in the wide range of styles of teapots that he produced over twenty years, from the late 1970s to the late 1990s. [MSR p.32]

In the early 1990s, Sherrill started creating pieces in clay using an extruder, a tool that pushes clay through a die to form hollow tubes that can be shaped into any form; by the late 1990s he was using the extruder for most of the artwork he produced. [MSR p. 36] Sherrill also started introducing color into porcelain clay and began experimenting with botanical forms that either arose in his imagination or from actual plants witnessed on daily on walks surrounding his studio. [TN] Sherrill personally creates the dies for the extruders that are used in his studio production. Many of his artworks from the past two decades incorporate metal and glass elements with the extruded clay, which is often layered and abraded to create a desired look, as well as kiln-fired up to four times. [CM p.31] [ACM]

Mudtools

In the 1990s, Sherrill started creating his own tools in response to a personal desire for functionality that expanded on the existing set of tools for potters and ceramic artists. In 1997, he founded Mudtools, a variety of hand tools in bright colors, as well as clay extruders. Mudtools are sold nationally and internationally, and are manufactured in Bat Cave, North Carolina. [MSR p. 36]

Exhibitions

A traveling retrospective show of Sherrill’s work launched in early 2019 at the Mint Museum before traveling to the Renwick Gallery and Arizona State University Art Museum. [TN]

Major exhibitions from the 1980s to present include shows at SOFA Chicago and SOFA New York; the John Michael Kohler Arts Center; the Ferrin Gallery, in Lenox, Massachusetts; Hodges Taylor, in Charlotte, North Carolina; The Blue Spiral 1, in Asheville, North Carolina; the Connell Gallery and the Dorothy McRae Gallery, in Atlanta, Georgia; at Western Carolina University in Cullowhee, North Carolina; at Wofford College, Spartanburg, South Carolina, and at the Mint Museum in Charlotte, North Carolina, among other venues. [Artist Website]

Collections

Public collections that possess work by Sherrill include the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Mint Museum; the Museum of Arts and Design; the Corning Museum of Glass; the Racine Art Museum, Racine, Wisconsin; MAD, New York, New York; the Museum of Glass in Tacoma, Washington, and the International Ceramic Museum in Inchon, S. Korea  [Artist Website] Sherrill’s “Incandescent Bottles” from 1993 were selected in that same year to be included in the White House Collection of American Crafts; the pieces are now in the collection of the William J. Clinton Presidential Library. [MSR p. 33]

Recognition

In 2003, the Mint Museum of Craft + Design designated Sherrill as Artist of the Year. Sherrill was the 2010 United States Artists Wingate Fellow. In 2019, the James Renwick Alliance named Sherrill a Master of the Medium (Ceramic). [Artist Website]

Residencies

Among others, Sherrill has completed residencies in at the Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts in Newcastle, Maine (2005), at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center (2006), and at the Museum of Glass (2010). [Artist Website]

References

[CM] “Michael Sherrill: A Place of Discovery”. Ceramics Monthly. October 2019.

[MSR] Annie Carlano, ed. “Michael Sherrill Retrospective”. The Mint Museum, Charlotte, N.C. 2018.

[TN] “Spirit and the imagination: Decades of work by artist Michael Sherrill in traveling retrospective exhibit”. The Hendersonville Times-News. 2018-12-16.

[ACM] “Natural Narratives”. American Craft Magazine. April/May 2010.

[Artist Website] michaelsherrill.com

External links

Official website

Mudtools.com

Further reading

Nora Atkinson. “Craft for a Modern World: The Renwick Gallery Collection”. 2015.

Jo Lauria. “Color and Fire: Defining Moments in Studio Ceramics, 1950-2000”. 2000-07-07.

Mark Del Vecchio. “Postmodern Ceramics”. Thames and Hudson. 2001.