Old dolls, marionettes and puppets continue to fascinate me with their enigmatic spirits and hidden past lives. As an artist, I have always wanted to create unusual objects that could refer to other realities, and which would possess a mysterious logic of existence. My first ceramic figure began as a kind of re-creation of an antique doll. All my figures have become explorations of spirit which exists between the make-believe and the real. I locate characters in this in-between place by drawing on my imagination, memory and experience of nature and culture. As I carve, texture and mark the clay, a narrative identity emerges. The narrative implications of the work seem to originate as much with the viewer as with myself. I see this viewer participation as the final step in the animation of the figures."
-Valerie Bunnell

Valerie Bunnell received a BS from University of Vermont, a BFA from the University of Massachusetts and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has apprenticed in studios in New England and taught ceramics at Triton College. She is now a full-time studio artist in western Massachusetts, where she lives with her husband and daughter.

Represented at Cove Road: 508.247.9172