| Cherie Ramsdell is a
South Dakota artist who works primarily in antler, bone,
rawhide, and raku fired clay. Cherie became interested in
pottery as a personal form of expression while working on
her Masters in Art Education at Northern State University
in Aberdeen, South Dakota.
The material and forms Cherie uses have both a freshness and an ancient nature.
Like her, they are not frozen in time. She values them as anchors to the past
and welcomes their continuity and timeless quality. Living on the Plains of the
Dakotas has made Cherie, a rancher's daughter, very aware of the power of Mother
Nature. Like Mother Nature, raku is spontaneous and unpredictable yet sometimes
fragile. Those contradictions drew Cherie to further investigate raku fired clay
forms.
The hide, combined with the bone she finds on the prairie, suggests a resurrection,
the passing of life, and the nourishment of new life. Bones possess a unique,
almost musical quality, a kind of instinctive rhythm which intrigues her. "I
connect them with the base of the human experience, the dual heartbeat of a mother
and a child-almost like a primitive drum beat which ties together and puts the
universe in order," Cherie says.
Cherie uses the rawhide as a symbol of all living things. Like a creature in
the early stages of life, freshly tanned rawhide is very fluid, silky, without
a definite form. Later, with the passing of time, the flexibility and the moisture
dissipate, causing the rawhide to become hard and unrelenting. Those contradictory
qualities of flexibility and firm resistance, Cherie knows, can be found in people
from all walks of life.
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