Vince Palacios has been working in the field of ceramic art since 1988. Palacios received his Masters of Ceramic Art from Alfred University and his BFA in ceramics at California State University at Long Beach. He now serves as Professor of the Ceramics Department at El Camino College in Torrance California. He came to El Camino College in 2011 after teaching for six years at Western Illinois University and ten years before that at California State University, Long Beach. He has shown his work nationally and internationally and is included in several important private collections as well as prominent museum collections. Palacios continues to exhibit his work and has developed a unique approach to the use of raw glass and ceramic materials as a means of crafting intricate narratives addressing geological process, pyroclastic interaction, and heat/chemical reactions

“As I worked on this series, humor and awkwardness emerged in the completed forms. My process is like that of a comedian or performer preparing for a routine: there are set ideas, techniques and expectations. However, each time you create or perform, something new emerges in response to external stimulus, or circumstance. I love improvisational work! Of course, there are things that I’m able to do with forethought and skill, but I’m most interested in those things that emerge in the moment. Unexpected, surprising, mostly uncontrolled. I am employing the wheel and hand building methods that leave many marks on the surface of the work.

There’s nothing new about the intimacy of touching clay and leaving your mark in earthen materials. Humans have been doing this from the very beginning; leaving a record or evidence of their existence, expression, and belief in any given material that they handle. It is a form of self- importance; a belief that what you’re saying is worth preserving. In this recent work, there is an almost haptic quality. it’s a language not composed of words, rather a composition of marks and bumps and stretching and pressing. In the end a story is being told, a form emerges; a truth is expressed.

I call the lumps or bulbous forms ‘potatoes’ on my work, but it doesn’t matter if you call them lumps, or bumps, or clumps, or tumors or potatoes, or whatever; these forms have always found their way into my work and have continued to show that humor has always played a significant role in my work from the very beginning. There is a clumsy sense of being out of place, of protruding or protrusion that creates a feeling of awkwardness. My goal is not to cause viewers to feel awkward, rather, to personally reflect on the sense of being out of place and finding a way of fitting in.”

Potato tree: Yellow Vines

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Potato tree: Yellow Vines

Biography Vince Palacios+

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