Meet the Artist
Fascinated by the preservation of the past, Mitchell Spain is a ceramic artist using highly technical processes including mold-making and porcelain slipcasting to fool the eye with his ultra-realistic, 'rusty' ceramic mugs, cups, flasks and more. He draws inspiration from the Iowa family farmland on which he was raised, where he now raises his children alongside his wife, Reanna. He is the author of Threaded: A Guide to Creating Ceramic Threads.
Artist Statement
Clay Resurrects the Past
It revives old memories and awakens my lineage of artistic relatives. My bond to this medium is rooted in my deep connection to the rural Iowa farmland on which I was raised. Within my art, I’m taken back to my earliest memories of hunting through 100 years of farm equipment, rusty car parts, and unidentified objects in the barns and buildings my family built their lives around. These remnants of a bygone era were preserved with the intention of reuse as a means to save money, a widespread practice in rural America following the Great Depression. The ingenuity needed to economically refurbish old equipment and tools was born out of necessity and passed down through the generations of my family.
My father, my first artistic influence, took these discarded relics of rural America and breathed new life into them as art. The idea of being able to reinvent a purpose for an object, and the challenge of the process, resonates with me and is a foundation of my work as an artist.
I create sculptures and functional porcelain vessels with a facade of rust and decaled imagery. These refined and technically compelling pieces appear to be selected directly from an old barn and their vintage inspired labels and ultra-realistic rust paint a vivid picture of time, emotions and memories conserved.