Pattie Chalmers currently lives and works in Carbondale, IL. Well known for creating narrative-based functional pottery, figurative sculpture, and installations, Chalmers looks forward to using her time in residence to further explore the nature of objectness and the aura of association by redeveloping themes and explorations to create an altogether new project.
Chalmers received her BFA in printmaking from the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, CA in 1993 and her MFA in ceramics from the University of Minnesota-Minneapolis in 2001. Transitioning from the role of student to teacher, she began work as an instructor shortly after completing her MFA. Having taught at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis and Ohio University in Athens, she has been an Associate Professor at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, IL since 2006. In addition to these sustained posts, Chalmers has led myriad lectures and workshops at art centers, universities, and institutions spanning the United States and in both Canada and Hungary.
Utilizing a variety of approaches during the making process, Chalmers works to create tableaux as an expression of a two-dimensional narrative space made three-dimensional. With fabrications depicting a shrinking of the distance between fact and fiction, her works visualize accounts from varying experiences that are amalgamated to reflect the flux of how things are remembered. She notes, “I am inherently an explainer and a storyteller and through my work attempt to map my experiences—a collage of influences combined with historical and fanciful elements revealing my observations about identity, ideologies, and what I learn about others and myself.”
Over the past ten years, Chalmers has shown work in group exhibitions on five continents, in six countries, and in thirty-two states—totaling over ninety exhibitions. Since 2004, her work has been featured in solo exhibitions at venues including the Craft Alliance in St. Louis, MO, Red Lodge Clay Center in Red Lodge, MT, Hunter Project Room at Hunter College in New York, NY, and Trisolini Gallery in Athens, GA. Chalmers has work in the collections of the San Angelo Museum of Fine Arts in San Angelo, TX, The Clay Studio in Philadelphia, PA, and Kamm Teapot Foundation in Statesville, NC.