TESTIMONIALS

Sorensen’s ultimate subject, is growth and change. Movement and energy are the essence of life, characteristics of both the physical world surrounding us and our own interior landscape. Sorensen’s works breathe with this truth; in turn, they convey this truth to us.

Eleanor Heartney, Art Critic and Author

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Her work consistently has sprung from her central concern for the Earth, its endless variations and permutations, her abiding respect for its materials, generative and eroding forms and immense forces, past and pre-sent and future. She has moved forward continually, to express herself in new ways, to state and restate her core beliefs, and even to turn them upside down; a modernist with a strong sense of the whole panorama of art, she has grown increasingly free in the ways she sees, evaluates, formulates and, instinctively, makes her art. In her most recent body of work, Sorensen sharpened her focus, paring all extraneous material away and reaching, provocatively, toward a personal, and highly resonant, abstraction.

Laura Stewart, Writer and Art Historian

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There is no doubt that the power of the earth is en-meshed in Barbara Sorensen’s works. There is a tactile quality in all her clay pieces that speak of the cragginess and topography of our environment.
Barbara Sorensen understands something many artists seem to forget. All cultures have objects of ceremony, ritual, celebration and spiritual power. Sometimes our society and our artists seem to be losing these powerful traditions. Sorensen has allowed her spiritual instincts and her humanism to inform her inherent object, the vessel, to demand a response from the viewer.

Jan Clanton, Associate Curator Orlando Museum of Art

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Echoing ancient tradition, Barbara Sorensen’s works—with their myriad forms and materials—are rich with meaning. Her works simultaneously refer to the landscape, act as metaphors for time and embody ideas pregnant with ceremonial and elemental implications.
From making works from the earth, Sorensen has progressed to making works that recall and embody those atavistic elements that form the earth. Whether working with clay, metal, ropes or resin, the artist continues to create haunting forms that carry multiple allusions and associations and reward extended viewing.

Barbara Bloemink, Executive Director Anderson Ranch Arts Center

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Barbara Sorensen continues to surprise us with her formidable ambition and talent for articulating large and looming forms of paper clay in ceramics.  To me it’s an impressive sky-full of shapes!  They seem balanced ambiguously, challenging gravity in defiance of an uneasy truce with nature.

She then turns to other inventions that are lacy, enveloping you, embroidering the walls and surrounding space.  She also shows opposites, like sturdy juggernauts of heroic pavement stones extruding upwards and inhabiting the ground level as you walk around them.  They seemingly spring from nature also and seem part of it.

Some of her sculptural explorations have a hint of the figure, which I really like.  They are understated and mysterious as she continues her search in expanding her knowledge of expressive ceramics.  She builds on her inventive history of clay, developing new amazing forms, textures, space, and volume relationships.  My admiration grows with her tenacious and significant development in the clay medium.

Rudy Autio, American Ceramic Legend

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From the intimacy of the early Princess Leia forms to the more recent human-sized Pinnacles, Barbara has not only played with scale, but her combination of non-functional forms with geological references have left her work embedded with metaphor. Although layered with meaning, there’s a clarity in her work that is both fresh and vibrant.

Paul Soldner, Ceramic Artist
Founder of American Raku

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It is always a pleasure to watch a student of yours continue to excel over the years in an experimentive way; pushing the envelope, exaggerating shapes, combining dissimilar forms, and using color and texture in an aggressive manner to create objects of significance. When these forms are put in their proper context, be it in a living space or an outdoor environment, they do not become answers about art, the viewer goes away asking a question. This, to me, is what art is about. Not telling the whole story, but giving you clues which you can assimilate in your own way.

I remember one afternoon at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, Barbara was working with clay forms that were trying desperately to be exaggerated and outgrow the confines she had imposed on them. “Barbara,” I said, “Why the hell don’t you just let them grow?” And I’ll be damned if she didn’t. I applaud her willingness to take chances and not to become complacent with the ordinary. The new forms are setting standards again for the next series. Keep pushing the limits.

Don Reitz
American Ceramic Master