About
Judith Condon Biography
My life is busy. I fill my time with what seems like three full-time jobs: teaching at Baylor School, taking care of my family, and making art in the summers. Full-time job number one is my family of two children, Elijah and Lydia, one dog, one guinea pig and five fish. Full-time job number two is teaching at Baylor, a college preparatory school in Chattanooga, TN, where I teach a range of 6th through 12th graders myriad visual art topics, like printmaking, ceramics, and photography, to name a few. Full-time job number three is making personal art, but only in the summers. I build clay busts in my spider-laden basement laundry room, and I explore digital photography with Lightroom, and Photoshop, including both programs with traditional and experimental photography on my Mac computer. At times, I have merged my interest in photography with ceramics and printmaking. Because of my school, I’m fortunate to be able to continue professional development mostly in the summers at places such as Maine Media Workshops, Santa Fe Photographic Workshops, Anderson Ranch, Haystack and Arrowmont. All my workshops and personal studio interests make their way back to the classroom, as I feel it’s important to practice what I preach. What I miss, however, is being a part of an artist community where artists have literal and metaphorical conversations about art. Job three has gone silent for the past few years. Although I still produce art, it sits quietly in my basement, collecting dust and dirt.
Artist Statement
I’ve always struggled with my artist statements. Should I be so bold as to speak about the very personal nature of my work or stay within my safe public narrative? In my reticence, maybe reluctance, to talk about it, I think the work should explain itself, but that’s cliché. My reluctance is that my personal story is too personal and does too good of a job demystifying the work, while the public truth falls short of the essence of what drives me. Whatever the story, I want the one that does a better job holding interest, so I reveal some of the layers of meaning—but never all—and the layers of which I speak change depending on whose listening and what‘s happening in my life at the moment. I do know for certain that my story is always an autobiography, a reflection of the way I see the world, my family and myself, consciously and unconsciously.
One layer that I am aware of is that of growing older in a culture that worships youth and struggles with aging. As I grow older, I am increasingly aware of this issue and find that I have, unfortunately, bought into this American value. I am a product of my culture; I don’t want to get old. I watch lines appear on faces and hair turn gray on friends and family (me, too), for instance, and am compelled to reflect this onto clay. Though this meaning resonates very clearly to me, the other subtexts reveal themselves slowly over a long time in fragmented subtexts. They often begin as phrases that swim in my head as I work, a sort of mantra that manifests itself in the figure.