Four ceramic artists were named winners of the Archie Bray Foundation's annual fellowship awards. The Lilian fellowship was awarded to sculptor Brian Rochefort; the Lincoln Fellowship went to figurative sculptor Renee Audette, slip-caster Jeremy Hatch received the Taunt Fellowship, and figurative sculptor Anne Drew Potter was selected as the first recipient of the Matsutani Fellowship.

Each fellowship awards $5,000 and a one-year residency at the foundation to artists of exceptional accomplishment and promise. Beneficiaries are expected to embrace the Bray experience of community and exchange, and have the opportunity to focus their attention towards producing and exhibiting a significant body of work. Artists Adrian Arleo and Sarah Jaeger joined Bray Resident Artist Director StevenYoung Lee in selecting this years award winners.

Click here to view 2007-2008 Fellowship Monograph written by Ashok Mathur.

Brian Rochefort grew up in Rhode Island. He attended the Rhode Island School of Design, where he graduated with honors in 2007.

"I intended my Rockstar Energy Gloops to be a commentary on the relentless commercialization of everything in sight, and the trend obsession that infects and saturates every facet of modern life. What is most important about my recent work is the form and its interaction with the surface painting where I incorporate celebrity status, pop icons, tattoo motifs, graffiti, glitter, and the ubiquitous hearts and stars. Like an abstract narrative on a Greek Vessel, these spray painted, globular, suggestive forms tell a story about this time period in American Culture."

Brian Rochefort, thê_Èñïå¢_²Ø²¹_ÄÐ_HÐ

Renee Audette receive her BFA from the University of Wyoming, and her MFA from the University of Florida. Since graduating, Audette has been living and working in Gainesville, FL as a studio artist and part-time professor at Santa Fe Community College. She has been showing her work at various venues, both nationally and internationally, and was recently featured as an emerging talent in the May, 2007 issue of Ceramics Monthly.

"My work represents, simultaneously, the beauty and ugliness that is inherently part of each of us. I deal with concerns specific to outward expressions of interior paradoxes. Feminine in nature, the work often makes ironic commentary on the stereotypes of girlhood innocence and naivete."

Renee Audette, Surprise, Surprise

Jeremy Hatch is a Vancouver-based artist who constructs large-scale cast porcelain sculpture. He has received several research/production/travel grants and attended residencies at the Takumi Studios in Japan, the European Ceramic Work Centre in the Netherlands, Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts, and the Archie Bray Foundation. Jeremy has taught courses at Interlochen Center for the Arts, Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design and the Rhode Island School of Design.

Jeremy Hatch, Still

Anne Drew Potter attended Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania for her undergraduate education, and she received a MFA degree from the New York Academy of Art, and was awarded a travel fellowship to the U.K. through the Royal Academy of Art in London. She pursued a second Masters at Indiana University.

"My work bridges contemporary conceptual and narrative concerns with certain elements of sculptural tradition to question both our current constructions of identity as they relate to the body and the manner in which these are connected to a historically informed sense of self.

I am interested in the moment when the self-evidence of our own experiences is challenged by confrontation with the other, the infinity of realities that exist outside of our own. I manipulate signifiers of gender, race, age, and other identity characteristics to encourage viewers to confront their feelings about normalcy, difference, and what defines human."

The Taunt, Lincoln, Lilian and Matsutani fellowships are awarded in each year and are made possible by Robert and Suzanne Taunt, Joan and David Lincoln, Osamu and Grace Matsutani and an anonymous donor. The fellowships reflect the commitment of the donors to ceramic excellence and innovation, as well as their regard for the significance of the Bray's artistic community. The Archie Bray Foundation was the first artist residency program in the United States devoted solely to ceramics. For over fifty years the Bray has brought together artists with diverse backgrounds and approaches to the medium, creating an environment conducive to artistic exchange and individual expression.

Anne Potter, Elizabeth and the Big Head Boys