Today we’d like to introduce you to Alex Hodge.
Hi Alex, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?
Always a creative kid full of imagination and daydreams, I struggled to find an outlet that combined my love of hands-on work with my love of stories. The obvious choice was to pursue art in college, but I found ceramics by happenstance. As I stayed longer and longer hours in the pottery studio, I found myself more at ease in the medium. I continued my education at the University of Miami for a graduate degree, with the purpose of learning more techniques and increasing my skill level. As life took its turns, I began to question my place in the white room of the gallery, in jargon, as if meaning could only be found in this language, in this room, by these people. Slowly but surely I whittled my practice back down to its roots: function, story, accessibility. Now, as always, I make to process and transmute the great pain and beauty of this life, the great grief and immeasurable love, into object, image, and language. It allows me to persist, when all reason begs me to give up. Through the sharing of this work, I embed the love and complexity of the human experience in clay, from my hands to yours.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
Last time I chatted with Voyage it was the Miami chapter in 2019, and I was living almost an entirely different life. Freshly graduated from UM with an MFA, I struggled to balance my health, relationships, and work. I was testing various avenues for selling, while simultaneously teaching in a variety of positions. As covid disrupted many of these opportunities, and I reckoned with personal loss, I found that my priorities shifted the ground beneath me. The luster of being a Big City artist lost its sheen, and I felt called back to my roots. Returning to south Georgia to be near family and loved ones has allowed me to work at a slower pace, and finally have my own studio. In the intervening years, I have struggled with my health: a rocky and necessary journey to unlearn self worth as productivity, success as financial achievement, and needing help as weakness. My days are slower, my connections stronger, and my work all the more meaningful for it.
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
I create functional, one of a kind, highly decorated pieces of pottery. With an emphasis on surface design, I work to elevate the mundanity of nourishment with beauty. Mostly building through slab work, that is flattened sheets of clay, I make simple forms and use text, pattern, and symbology to decorate the surfaces. I love to experiment with different styles and imagery, but sgraffito, or carving through color, is my favorite technique. Inspiration is taken from nature, historical artwork, literature, and mysticism to craft unique stories drawn out by the audience. Some of my favorite works are custom requests designed for the client specifically. In one of the provided images you can see a Passover set I designed with the plagues fashioned as symbols through the middle. Being able to bring someone’s unique idea to life is so satisfying!
I also work on more elaborate and speculative work that I share through my art dealer, The Art:Design Project Gallery based in Miami. These works center on women’s experiences, both in historical and contemporary times. Often using the technique pastiche, in which other artworks are referenced and emulated, I aim to create a conversation with the art historical canon and women’s existence. Ultimately, I hope that somewhere between the solitude of studio work and the bustle of the gallery, we might have a moment of connection and understanding that allows us to be a little bit better than we were before.
Is there anything else you’d like to share with our readers?
In times of great strife and global chaos, I hope you find a way to share your voice, whether it be in writing, artwork, or otherwise. Artists hold a unique cultural position to craft and rework the stories we are given, but that is not unique to us. Everyone has a right to investigate the woven narratives; when a loose thread is found, we must pull on it to unravel what is untrue. Let us use our voices to mend the tapestry, to create a true telling of what we are and what we can be. I’ll leave you with an excerpt from the poem Transcendental Etude by Adrienne Rich:
“The woman who sits watching, listening,
eyes moving in the darkness
is rehearsing in her body, hearing-out in her blood
a score touched off in her perhaps
by some words, a few chords, from the stage:
a tale only she can tell.
But there come times—perhaps this is one of them –
when we have to take ourselves more seriously or die;
Contact Info:
- Website: https://alex-hodge.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/creationsbyalexhodge/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/creationsbyalexhodge/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCoEDP6ZJhXs3Eocvi_SIHxg
- Other: https://creationsbyalexhodge.etsy.com
