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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