Ceramic Art and Perception--Judy Onofrio Earth Bound

Judy Onofrio uses ceramic objects and bones to create dramatic sculptures that celebrate the living and the dead. These sculptures are both harmonious and mysterious and allow the viewer to look beneath the surface, to glance a teaming reality that is always present but rarely glimpsed.

These sculptures imply that even at life's end and beyond it, there is beauty, harmony, surprise, and striving. Her bones along with the seeds, cells or mushrooms that she adds, create new life rather than arid bones that imply the end of generation and productivity. Some viewers might be repulsed by the fact that Onofrio uses bones in her sculptures, but how she arranges them makes it hard for them to be read as bones. They sweep like swathes of sculpted clay, clumped like squeezed handfuls of earth and dance like branches in the wind.