In Taking Care, Jane Ritchie, Dodd Graduate Advisor, and Isys Hennigar, Dodd MFA candidate, consider the complex ways in which humans engage the living world. The works in the exhibition explore the language of care through slow processes, delicate balances, meticulous adornment, and attention to the fragility of living things. The tangled narratives of Hennigar’s ceramic work interweave organisms, vessels, and tools used to mediate human relationships with other species. Ritchie uses a variety of materials from pelts to metal to explore animals as commodities, investigating the ways in which various species are culturally regarded. In exhibition, the works are staged in such a way to recall early museums and objects as “curiosities.” Through layered associations and suggestions of collectively familiar forms, this collaborative exhibition makes visible the inextricable links between the human and the animal.

Isys Hennigar was born in North Carolina and is currently a second year MFA student at the University of Georgia. Her work in ceramic sculpture uses narratives surrounding the natural world as vehicles for thinking about living things as ecologically integrated with each other and human activity. She received her BFA in Studio Art from the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, and has exhibited recently at the North Carolina Museum of Art, Lump Gallery in Raleigh, NC, and the Hambidge Center in Georgia.

Jane Ritchie resided in Eastern Virginia for the majority of her life where she attained her undergraduate degree from Old Dominion University followed by an MFA at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan. Her work, over the years, has touched on the perceived values of objects and animal materials reflecting on ownership, intimacy, and decoration. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally in Canada, Belgium, Germany, and Australia.