Mindy Tousley & George Roby | Manifestations in Paper & Clay

Opening Reception | Mansfield Art Center | Sunday, June 26 | 1-5pm

Satellite Exhibition Location | Mansfield Art Center | Foundation Gallery | 700 Marion Ave. Mansfield, OH 44906 | 419.756.1700

Mansfield Art Center Hours | Tuesday: 11-5, Wednesday: 11-5, Thursday: 11-5, Friday: 11-5, Saturday: 10-4, Sunday:11-4

Manifestations in Paper & Clay, explores the friendship between Mindy Tousley & the late George Roby, the synchronicity of their work, and their shared use of abstraction to present their observations and experiences of the world through their art, exemplifying the larger conversation between artists which crosses time.

Mindy Tousley is the Executive Director of The Artists Archives of the Western Reserve (AAWR) and a committed studio artist. Her practice as an artist using paper is influenced by her own background as a ceramicist and is built around her appreciation for the beauty of the accidental mark or the random act. In this, her approach is very much like Roby’s approach to the clay. Her work is based on her observations of her everyday life, the natural world, and the urban environment, banality, absurdity and ugliness or beauty. She finds joy in creating order out of chaos, unbalancing and rebalancing and then finding the center.

The late Archived Artist George Roby, a graduate of Cranbrook, was a highly respected Ohio potter, sculptor, and teacher who mainly produced both functional and sculptural works in the medium of clay. Many of his pieces in Manifestations are deeply personal sculptures chronicling his own unique emotional experience as a caregiver for his wife Sue, as they faced the daily realities of her Alzheimer’s diagnosis before her death in 2014. These pieces have mainly been shown as part of the Art Interprets Alzheimer’s Exhibition, which has travelled to over 20 different venues since 2012 and is now part of the collection of the AAWR. Roby’s other works are predominantly altered vessels. They embrace the concept of imperfection; a simple stretching of volume from the inside which throws the symmetrical pot off balance, or a line drawn down through the clay on the outside while it is wet and malleable, fresh from the potters’ wheel. His actions accentuate and draw our attention to the nature of the clay, and the imperfections of the individual.

*Text courtesy of The Mansfield Art Center.