15th Annual Bascom Clay Symposium

Celebrating the 15th anniversary of the Bascom Annual Clay Symposium, we are pleased to present Kirsten Stingle, TJ Erdahl, and Natasha Dikareva as our 2025 artists.  The artists will highlight Sculpture through sharing stories, inspirations, and techniques learned through the years.

About the artists

Kirsten Stingle - "Currently the themes I am exploring in my work center around reweaving humanity back into the ecology and rooting our stories in multi-species, polyphonic possibilities. Basically, I would like to demo how I build a head.  To do this, I will create three heads in various states of my process to allow for demonstrations on multiple stages of the process."

Natasha Dikareva - "As an artist, I find inspiration in the world around me and in my personal experiences. I am moved by the events, people, books, movies, music, and nature. At the heart of my art is a desire to communicate something meaningful and profound to the audience. I use my work to tell stories, challenge assumptions, and inspire others to see the world in a new light.

I employ a traditional process. It all starts with an idea that is born in my head. From there, I begin to depict it in my sketchbook, exploring different angles and perspectives until I arrive at a vision that excites me. Once I have refined the design of the maquette, I move on to creating the final sculpture. Throughout the creation of my sculptures, I remain connected to my original inspiration, allowing the piece to evolve and grow as I work through the process. Clay remains my favorite medium, yet other media can enhance it. Recently, I started sculpting and blowing glass to capture the essence of translucent, ephemeral shapes evoking water and clouds.  As stimuli for imagination, clouds invite us to find familiar shapes and recognize figures in the drifting puffs, inspiring countless legends of atmospheric deities from around the world. The combination of glass and clay sculpture traces the line between reality and reverie, bringing to life exquisite, surreal, impossible creatures to evoke serenity and transformation."

TJ Erdahl - When considering the murky reservoir of human history, it is difficult to separate legend from reality. Through my work, I examine human myth in the modern age, specifically on characters that emerge from our society's underbelly; the less popular folk. Using their "legends", I feel compelled to tell stories that illustrate analogies in life; blending together archetypes, shared experiences, and my own personal mythology. Who we are in the world is a kaleidoscope of interpretations, biased memories, and personal connections.

Ceramic sculpture and portraiture, in particular, are forms of a visual narration that I use to satisfy my urge for documenting what I see in human nature. Evocative of well-loved toys and obsolete artifacts, I use the implied history of these objects to encourage the viewer to disconnect from the present situation and conjure their own individual narratives from my sculptures.