Kimberlyn Bloise's exhibition asks us to accept imperfection

On her exhibition title, "Perfect," she said: “It’s a little bit tongue-in-cheek. On my poster and where I posted the title on the wall, it’s a little bit askew ... So it’s all about the imperfections and focusing on those and being comfortable with discomfort.”

One of her pieces, titled “Unus Post Alterum” (Latin for “One After Another”), is a series of ceramic pentagons stacked one after another. “It’s all free-stacked — there’s nothing holding all the pieces together, they’re just all leaning on each other,” said Bloise.

The pentagons are all connected, and they rotate throughout the piece, varying in sizes, and spanning the entirety of the pedestal it’s displayed on. Bloise explained that this piece is meant to “invite people to interact with it, and get down lower to look through it, or look at it from different angles.” 

She also explained that the piece’s fragile appearance is meant to scare her viewers a little bit. “If you know there’s nothing holding it together, if you walk past it, are you going to walk too roughly and shake the floor and knock everything over?” Bloise made sure the statue wouldn’t fall over, but she wanted the potential to feel present.

Another of Bloise’s pieces is called “Facie Rosea,” or “The Pink Fear,” named so because it's another with a fragile appearance. “It’s just stacked up and scary.” Bloise wanted to use this fear because “it’s very dangerous to do that, and it’s scary for me to put together … there’s nothing keeping it from falling apart at any time.” This piece features a variety of repetitions off of the triangle. 

While Bloise works primarily in clay mediums, she did have a few wall pieces for this show. Her drawings are line-based, and they directly relate to the ceramics pieces. Both ceramics and drawn pieces focused heavily on repetition and optical art influences. 

The paper she used for the drawings was handmade by the Grounded Printshop in Erie, which Bloise turned into paper clay. “You make shredded up paper — I used recycled paper — and you mix it in with the clay when it’s still wet,” she said. “Then when you’re making things with it, it makes the paper stronger, and it also allows you to go more thin … when you fire the pieces, the paper just burns out so then your clay is a little bit porous.”

Most of Bloise’s pieces are assembled after firing because they’re delicate and large. “The big stacked tower pieces have dowel rods in between the layers, and then four of the pieces are just stacked together,” she said. “So when I take them apart, they’ll come apart piece by piece, and then if I put them together again, it’ll be a little bit different every time.” 

Hazel Modlin is the Arts Editor for The Spectator. She can be reached at edinboro.spectator@gmail.com.