ARTIST STATEMENT
My work explores the relation between art, emotion, and viewer by reducing sentience and being down to a simpler form. By establishing a style of work that references the individual without portraying the particulars, I am able to place the crafted objects in different scenes and contexts to explore their interaction as organisms with that particular environment. From this exploration, I dissect parts of the artificial context to understand the emotions that these items create, and discern solutions to mitigating or enhancing these sentiments. I then reassemble these discoveries into new contexts to convey this new information.
Currently, my focus is in understanding security, the sense of belonging, and how these concepts may relate to anxiety. By representing corners and edges in a softer manner, portraying color transitions in gradient, and casting light in slow transitions, I seek to understand what choices may help to reduce the mental noise caused by a piece, and by establishing relations between forms that represent beings, I examine what aspects help us to feel as though we belong and are secure.
BIO
Daniel Ruch grew up in Leonardville, a small town in northeast Kansas. Ruch discovered clay and art during his studies of MIS at Kansas State University. Fascinated with the potential of the medium, Ruch initially worked with a wide range of unconventional and experimental techniques, such as casting glass from dry materials to firing electronic circuitry attached to ceramic works. He settled into working with earthenware clays adorned with terra sigillata, and began to explore ideas related to his experiences before and during college. Ruch seeks to communicate concepts about emotion and craft a unique atmosphere for each piece by confronting the root ideas of each piece and conveying the information that this confrontation yields.