Born in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, Carol Horst grew up surrounded by natural beauty, an enduring source of artistic inspiration. She has been an artist for as long as she can remember. After obtaining an undergraduate degree in drawing and painting, Carol completed a Master's Degree in fine art photography. Her career was spent as a college and secondary-level art teacher and writer for Davis Art Publications. Now a full-time artist, she has been working as a ceramic sculptor for six years. To her art practice, she brought an interest in the simplified forms of nature and industrial design, an ambition to investigate creative and technical challenges, and an understanding of the expressive potential in abstraction. A lifelong habit of using the language of visual art to communicate personal ideas has given Carol deftness and confidence in forming expressive objects with her hands. Carol divides her artistic practice between a studio in Pasadena, California and a remote space in the wilderness of the Tehachapi Mountains, where she pit-fires her work. Carol sells her work directly to designers and collectors and regularly exhibits in invitational and juried shows.
Statement
The force behind my sculptural forms is a primal need to make things. In the end, there is an object or grouping that I consider successful in its respect for materials, truth to a personal aesthetic, and esteem for craft, but also that I find meaningful in ways not easy to describe in words. It is in the making that the objects become ideas, rather than the other way around. By using simplified, abstracted visual language, I create something open-ended that others might connect with in similar ways.
Multiplicity is an essential component of my artistic vision. Whether part of a stack or a series of similar forms, individual objects derive deeper meaning in their relationships with others, playing off shared or contrasting formal attributes and psychological associations. In so doing, each grouping becomes its own idea, beyond the reading of individual parts. This pull towards working in sets is intrinsic. As an identical twin, my identity and my artistic approach to objects are part of a “we” rather than a single entity.
Some groupings respond to dilemmas: animal and humanlike forms might coexist in stacks, oblivious of their impact on each other or the weight they are bearing on one another’s behalf. The beings, burdensome and burdened, expose my curiosity about our conflicted relationship with animals and our own animal nature. Other forms toy with uncertainty. Many seem to be sort of, but never exactly, something: they elude designation, frustrating attempts at literal interpretation. Their quality of being nearly a thing but not quite that thing invites various associations.
I draw inspiration for some pieces from the stillness of rocks stacked to mark paths. With their tenuous balance, these cairns seem eerily alive, inviting anthropomorphic associations or linguistic decoding. My unglazed towers are a response to these rock forms. Also influential are ancient earthenware or stone sculptures peering from the pages of books or staged in museum cases. In their stylized abstraction, distortions, and selectively omitted details, these figures seem to have been created for purposes that resonate profoundly across millennia; in their refusal to divulge literal meaning or the creator’s exact intent, they exude all the more power.