Kansas City, MO ARTIST STATEMENTMy floral work was spurred by my travels to Jingdezhen, China where I worked directly with the local flower makers creating white porcelain flowers. I also use techniques that are borrowed from my previous career of decorating cakes and pastries and have adopted them to work with clay. I chose to make these pieces predominately with black clay to imbue the work with sinister beauty. This evokes the Victorian preoccupation with morbidity and material excess that can be used to examine contemporary human notions of life and death. There is also a wink and a nod to collections such as Wunderkammers or Cabinets of Curiosities as well as the Blaschka Flowers. BIOGRAPHYRain Harris is a sculptor and installation artist living in Kansas City. She received her Bachelor’s degree from Rhode Island School of Design and her MFA from The Ohio University. Her work has been exhibited in numerous group and solo exhibitions both nationally and abroad. She has also participated in residencies around the world and received grants and fellowships including an American Craft Council Emerging Artist Grant, an Independence Foundation Fellowship. Her work is in private collections and over a dozen national and international museums. Her work is spurred by an analytical interest in the ironies associated with excess and class, which become interpreted visually through color, pattern and decoration. She freely borrows stylistic embellishments and motifs from the decorative arts and combines incongruous elements to create work that pushes decorative eclecticism to a point of excessive overindulgence.