"Break Away by Parker Hunt" Opening at Walnut Gallery

Please join us for the opening reception for Break Away by Parker Hunt. The meet-the-artist reception is on October 6, 6-8 PM. Admission is free and open to all.

Artist Bio:
Parker Hunt is a University of Alabama graduate student in ceramics with an assistantship. He is the instructor of record for ART 212 and assists in ART 412. Hunt received a BFA in ceramics and sculpture from the University of Montevallo and has taken graduate courses in ceramics at Ball State University. He has also studied at the Federal University of Goiás, Brazil, and Gadsden State Community College.

Hunt has taught ceramics and the history of ceramics at Gadsden State Community College in 2018 and taught ceramics at the K-12 level from 2014-2017. He has exhibited in national and regional juried exhibitions and has been a visiting artist at Carlow University, Pittsburgh, Penn.; artist-in-residence at the Walnut Gallery, and the Mary G. Hardin Center of Cultural Arts, both in Gadsden.

The show at Walnut Gallery will feature a body of work that culminated in Parker's MA Thesis Exhibition at the University of Alabama in March of this year. His previous show at Walnut Gallery featured finely crafted utilitarian pottery. As the title suggests, this exhibition is a break away from wheel-thrown pots towards purely abstract work that explores ideas beyond function.

About the art:
My current work is devoted to the evolution of form through process. While combining several ceramic processes, I married contrasting visual forces of hard lines and soft curves to convey a sense of process, expansion, and evolution. The conflicting and combining voices of form in each work speaks to the dynamic tensions in my own mind as I navigate through the human experience, including the death of my grandmother. Her clothing became an emotional vehicle to introduce pattern and color onto the surfaces of my work.