Raven Republica

Thank you for visiting! Here, you will find a selection of my work.

Rooted in a background in ceramics and art history, my practice spans clay, assemblage, collage and mixed media to connect the past with the present. I am deeply interested in bringing history forward, using my work to tell stories built upon our shared cultural and material heritage. 

I find inspiration all around me: nature, science fiction and horror movies, history, current events, images from satellites and scanning electron microscopes... Most especially, though, I am drawn to things that are broken, used, or damaged in some way. Things that others discard as useless. I find beauty in an object's history, in the signs of wear that show the object was once cared for and loved. I think old, used things have more interesting stories to tell if we are willing to listen.

My process relies on gathering these remnants from daily life and the environment, such as vintage print media, salvaged materials from recycling centers, broken objects, and organic elements like sticks, stone and rope. I also collect the non-physical, such as stories about marginalized communities throughout the ages. Whether these gathered materials remain distinct, become new ceramic pieces, or are merged into mixed media, they carry with them pre-existing narratives. Sometimes I allow these narratives to speak for themselves; other times I transform them to create new stories that I feel ought to be told.

By embracing history and juxtaposing the tactile traditions of ceramics with discarded modern artifacts, I aim to create a dialogue between eras and people. Ultimately, my work aims to unearth new meaning from that which has been historically overlooked, transforming fragmented remnants of our collective past into cohesive visual stories.

~ Wendi Raven