CHRISTIAN BAILEY
ABOUT THE ARTIST
CHRISTIAN BAILEY
Christian is a husband, a cat dad, an award winning artist, and art teacher living on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. He earned a BFA in sculpture and a Masters of Education from the University of Southern Mississippi. This is his 19th year as a high school art teacher, teaching art 1, 2, 3, 4, Advanced Placement Studio Art, and ceramics and recently has been selected to read the visual art portfolios for college board 2d/3d/drawing portfolios for this school year.
In addition to being a high school art teacher he maintains a robust studio practice that continuously pushes his boundaries of what clay can do in art. Workshops on clay sculpture, surface decoration techniques for pottery, glaze mixing, and how to use art in the classroom, round out the rest of his days.
He has had a series of solo and group shows around the southeast. Most notably Hinds Community College, Pearl River Community College, Jones County Junior College, Florida State College of Jacksonville, the Mary C. Cultural Center and Ohr O'Keefe Museum of Art. This year make the 2nd in a row for being selected to show at Art Fields and being one of only 3 artists from Mississippi for the year 2024.
When not teaching or creating ceramic art, Christian enjoys spending time with his wife and their four feline fur babies. He spends his weekends scouring thrift stores, scuba diving, working on his classic car and enjoys landscaping, with a keen interest in water features. He currently cares for two ornamental ponds, complete with fish, aquatic plants, and waterfalls.
“My work explores my journey of mental health, body image and societies marginalization of the atypical. I create to communicate the trauma and effects that trauma has upon an individual. In many cases that is accomplished by exposing my own experiences and laying them bare for the world to view.
Through my creativity I aim to spark conversation and give people the comfort in knowing that they are not alone.
I create the work using clay and strive to use only kiln fired techniques for surface decoration and color. This gives the work the warmth and soul of a much loved coffee cup while continuously offering challenges in the studio that keep it fresh. The majority of my sculptures are created using a hollow construction technique allowing me to rapidly form the piece and saves on the need to carve out clay as is typical standard practice. Surface color for much of the work is created by the use of colored slips and underglazes.
The firing of the work will range from low fire electric to atmospheric firing such as in wood and soda kilns. Depending on the nature of the piece and what is sparking the visual conversation is how I determine its final finish. In pieces such as "And sometimes I hear the word love" and "Never Full", the use of an atmospheric firing would have obliterated the surface and the message being conveyed. Works like "Lucky?" and "Why don't they fit" benefited from the chaos of the wood kiln, undergoing the trial of fire, being marked by it's passage, and coming out on the other side intact but forever changed. The use of animal imagery in much of my work is there to soften hard edges of the conversation. This opens the piece up, inviting viewers to come in closer and engage in the story without feeling the weight of human emotions. The inherent innocence that animals have lends to darken the work in a subtle way that would not be possible with the use of strictly human imagery. It also acts as a buffer for me in the creation of the work, putting just enough distance between myself and my experiences to allow me to start the conversation.”