Kristen Cliffel

Clay sculptor Kristen Cliffel uses whimsy to tell intensely personal stories. She draws upon incidents from her home life and transmutes them into a fairy tale realm full of familiar images from our shared, Disney-infused experiences. The resulting sculptures are playful, often humorous, sometimes cynical, and reveal both the joys and hardships of living in the modern world. Cliffel refers to the language of her work as “domestic mythology.”Though she considers herself “a storyteller that happens to make sculpture,” the stories Cliffel’s works allude to are not narrative, but rather a composite of cultural clues and recognizable memes that point viewers in a general direction, guiding them to associate their own stories with the work.