Molly Altman
Molly Altman
Molly Altman is a ceramic artist who works directly with her local floral ecology to create intricate porcelain sculptures. After discovering clay at age fifteen in her hometown of Amherst, Massachusetts, Molly went on to obtain a BA in ceramics from Bennington College in Bennington, Vermont in 2019. Her experience includes Artist Residencies at Green River Pottery in Santa Fe, New Mexico, Recipiente Estudio in Mexico City, Cobb Mountain Art and Ecology in Loch Lomond, California, and at the Carbondale Clay Center in Carbondale, Colorado. She has taught and shown work nationally and internationally and her works are featured in private and public collections including the Bennington College Permanent Collection and the Minnesota Museum of American Art. Molly moved to the Roaring Fork Valley in 2022 for a two-year residency at the Carbondale Clay Center, where she fell in love with the area’s natural beauty and artistic community. She currently lives and works in Carbondale, assisted in the studio by her border collie companion, Auggie.
WORKS ON DISPLAY
Always So
January in Aspen is a season marked by powerful sensations-- of cold, of vast beauty, of extreme darkness and light, of environmental stillness contrasting with the town's vibrancy. Winter in the mountains is a time of unpredictable challenges and beauty, but inevitably it tethers us to a geologic time scale that extends immeasurably beyond our daily lives.
My process seeks to permanentize fleeting moments through the collection of local flora at the height of its growing season, which I cast in porcelain and fire. This causes a transformation in clay through which the ephemeral becomes something enduring. The culminating works become reflections of frozen moments in time within an endless cycle of change. "Always So" reflects the sensory experience of a January in Aspen as a season of grandeur, endurance, and powerful energetic collisions, and speaks to our intimate positions within an infinite timescale. It calls us into the present moment and simultaneously extends beyond us, a reminder that;
“There was never any more inception than there is now,
Nor any more youth or age than there is now;
And will never be any more perfection than there is now,
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now”
-Walt Whitman, from “Song of Myself”