Courtney Wilson is a sculptor from Little Rock, Arkansas. Her ceramic work aims to connect historical narratives and create conversation around lost community value. By looking to the past and assessing the present, her work questions the political, economic, and social histories forming our communities. Wilson graduated in 2024 from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock with her BFA in Ceramics. After graduating, she received the artLAUNCH grant from the Windgate Foundation. She attended Touchstone Center for Crafts in 2024 as a Fall Resident, Penland School of Craft in 2024 and 2025 as a Winter Resident, and this summer will be a Summer Resident at Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts.
Statement
My ceramic sculptures examine how family narratives shift across generations—how memories splinter, reshape, and selectively persist. Working from personal photographs, I translate familial histories into forms that blur the line between remembered truth and reimagined myth. Each piece wrestles with the friction between what was lived and what is carried forward. Some memories arrive weighted with nostalgia, others with unease. I'm drawn to the gaps—the stories we amplify, the details we quietly abandon, the moments that dissolve in transmission from one generation to the next.
By borrowing the visual language of Greco-Roman sculpture and classical mythological compositions, I elevate ordinary family figures to heroic scale. This formal strategy isn't about grandiosity but about recognition: that our personal histories deserve the same reverence traditionally reserved for ancient heroes. The classical framework creates distance, allowing me to examine these intimate stories with both tenderness and a critical perspective. The work memorializes while acknowledging that all memory is reconstruction. Through clay, I freeze these interpretations—my contemporary reading of moments I never witnessed but inherited. Each sculpture becomes an artifact of translation, preserving not the original story but my generation's understanding of it, knowing full well that those who come after will shape it anew.