Much like life, Tip Toland’s work can be poetic, passionate, and now and again, unsettling. Her incredibly life-like sculptures – laboriously constructed of clay, stoneware, synthetic hair and paint – capture our bodies at their most vulnerable: naked, aging, exposed to the ravages of time and the elements. Yet at the heart of her work there is compassion, playfulness, and above all, acceptance of self.

Toland’s art represents the body as both physical being and as vessel, a mirror to the immaterial component of humanity. Her subjects are children and the elderly – each captured amidst one of life’s simple, strange and self-reflective, even spiritual moments: an aging woman swings playfully above a yawning box of jet black sand; a bathing-capped octogenarian prepares for her ultimate “Dive;” a scrawny nine-year-old in a wet swimsuit shivers against life’s chillingly harsh elements. Toland’s artwork, which projects both innocence and a startling complexity, speaks to both our lost past and our ambiguous future. “It’s the vulnerability of humanity that I’m after,” says the artist. This solo artist exhibition features six of the artist’s life-size and larger-than-life sculptures, five of which will debut at Bellevue Arts Museum.

About the Artist
A Virginia A. Groot Foundation Award and National Endowment for the Arts Visual Arts Fellowship recipient, Toland received an MFA in ceramics from Montana State University in 1981 and a BFA in ceramics from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1975. She has taught extensively nationally and locally at schools including Louisiana State University, University of Montana, Montana State University, University of Washington and Seward Park Clay Studio. She exhibits nationally and is represented by Nancy Margolis Gallery, NY and Pacini Lubel. Her work is in many prestigious collections such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Tip Toland: Melt, The Figure in Clay has been organized by Bellevue Arts Museum.