13 Sculptures: Megan Bogonovich

The Christopher Brodigan Gallery currently features an exhibit of thirteen sculptures by Megan Bogonovich, a Concord, NH area ceramic artist. Adjunct Professor at New Hampshire Technical Institute, and instructor at the Kimball Jenkins School of Art in Concord, NH, Ms. Bogonovich is a juried member and artist with the League of New Hampshire Craftsman who recently won Best of Show in their Biennial Juried Exhibition. She will be giving two master classes later this term to Groton ceramics students.

I like to tell intimate stories. I like to feel like I am sharing a quiet and detailed secret, one that you want to lean in and listen to. Clay is a good material for stories. It is inviting. A richly detailed and repetitively patterned surface makes a viewer come close. Clay has craft connotations, and relationships in scale to the figurine that make it feel accessible. But still, clay inspires a "how did they make this?" kind of wonder. Clay is known to be fragile and that brings out a gentle and cautious side to a viewer. It can slow down the rush, and inspire patience.

Many of my sculptures, this year, question the safety of the environments and relationships we create. They present scenarios about the comforts and the limitations of our secure personal worlds. Does Dorothy really think there's no place like home, or does she decide, as she did in the books, to go back to Oz and take her family with her? We are driven to the tops of high mountains, to the moon, to the ocean depths; we select door number two when we know what is behind number one. We build four walls around us, but still there is strong motivation to seek out risk and change. What would bring satisfaction to our daily existence? The sculptures combine naturalistic and abstracted imagery to suggest the possibility of the real and the imagined co-habitating, a whimsical reality. Unusual growths, curious routes, unlikely pairings, strange predicaments, surprises and wonder, comfort in the unlikely.