Artist: Mya Cluff
Title: Crown
Medium: Ceramic
Price: $2,200
Dimensions: 17 ½ x 10 ¾ x 7 inches
Artist Bio: Mya Cluff is a studio artist living and working in Belgrade, Montana. Born and raised in Oregon, she moved to Montana in 2017 after graduating from the Oregon College of Art and Craft where she received a BFA in Craft with an emphasis in Ceramics. Cluff has received multiple local and national grants, and has been included in written publications such as the book “An Artist and a Mother” for which she contributed a chapter written on her work and practice. Cluff has completed multiple short term residencies such as Red Lodge Clay Center in 2019, and Pentaculum at Arrowmont in 2023, and in 2021 debuted the show “Where Do I End and You Begin” at the Emerson Center for the Arts and Culture in Bozeman, MT as her first solo show. She has since exhibited both nationally and internationally in group exhibitions, and has work in various private collections.
Artist Statement: Motherhood is unkempt, complicated, and multifaceted.
It was my sudden unexpected transition into parenthood that inspired my exploration of the maternal. I looked at the softened, nostalgic and tame cultural view of the “normal” experience of being a mother, and saw it for what it was: a dramatic transformation, with some of the most intertwined and complicated interpersonal relationships imaginable. I continue a thread of questioning in my work to explore boundaries, moments of shifting, and blurred relationships between mother and child, and mother and self. I dive into the life and death cycle inherent in creation. I dissect how matrescence can cause an identity crisis by blurring a woman’s understanding of where she has her original self ends, and where she as mother begins. I am inspired by maternal psychology and by maternal lineage. I am struck by every individual and varied story of motherhood I come across, and how they all contain the common thread of exploration, renewal, and loss. My artwork, primarily driven by depictions of the female body, takes back the narrative of the mother from centuries of idealization and outsider perspectives, and I’m continually thrilled to examine the endless nuance of this age-old experience.
