AACG - Art Alliance for Contemporary Glass

Granite Calimpong

Artist Statement:

I am a multi-media sculptor working in ceramics, wood, glass, metal, light and photography. I create work that is sensitive to site and acutely aware of the contexts in which the work will be produced, displayed, and distributed. 

I am heavily invested in material exploration. I love clay, glass, wood, metal, light, and color. I have spent years, and in some cases decades, learning to work with these materials in order to obtain the technical information necessary to realize my ideas. Every material is unique, it has something specific to say, and I am invested in trying to use materials in ways that utilize their singular characteristics. 

I often deal with issues of perception in an attempt to expose blind spots within the way I experience the world. What can an optical illusion tell me about how my perceptive system can “misinterpret” the information before me? How can color make me feel one way in a given context, and totally different in another? And what do these facts expose about the limits of my attention and perceptive faculties? 

The human experience is a varied and complicated one. I strive to create work that interrogates these complexities while exhibiting my love for materials, my interests in the emotional impact of color, and my individual sense of balance and form.

About Granite Calimpong

Granite Calimpong received a BFA in Interdisciplinary Computing in the Arts and Music from the University of California San Diego, La Jolla, in 2007 and completed his MFA in sculpture at the University of Washington in 2019. While a graduate student at UW, he explored perception and various visual phenomena associated with illusions through the use of wood, clay, glass, photography, and metal. During the decade prior to attending the UW, Calimpong worked predominantly in glass, maintaining his own studio practice, assisting various renowned glass artists in the Seattle area, and working as a fabricator helping a number of non-glass artists realize their ideas in the medium.

Upon completion of his MFA, Calimpong took a position as a long-term resident at Pottery Northwest. During his residency he engaged in an intense two years of exploration which served as an extension and continuation of his graduate work and also allowed him to reconnect with clay, which was his first material love. He also has had artist residencies at Pilchuck Glass School, Museum of Glass, Tacoma, North Lands Creative Glass in Scotland, and Pittsburgh Glass Center. After mounting a solo show titled Stolid in January 2022, which coincided with the end of his PNW residency, Calimpong moved into a small studio in the Ballard neighborhood of Seattle where he has continued his explorations.

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Acknowledgment of Gallery:
We are grateful to Traver Gallery, Seattle, Washington, for providing the Artist of the Month.