Artist Statement by Alison Bergman
Join us for the opening reception from 5-7pm on Sunday, September 13th.
I’m a mixed media artist fascinated by color and surface. Through a hybrid practice that merges ceramics, painting, printmaking, fiber, and installation, I use space as a medium to build a world that I want to see. I am drawn to a form of expressionism in which play, chance, and improvisation remain open rather than tightly controlled. I use color expansively to create a generous visual environment—one that welcomes joy, exuberance, and discovery and holds open the possibility that an encounter with the work might be briefly transformative.
Much of my work begins with porcelain slabs printed intuitively on both sides with layers of geometric and organic patterns using stencils and brightly colored underglazes. I cut, bend, fold, weave, and assemble these surfaces into three-dimensional forms, allowing patterns to disappear and reemerge as the clay moves through space. Porcelain is a contradictory material: smooth and luminous, but also temperamental, prone to warping and slumping when pushed too far. Working with it becomes a negotiation between control and surrender. I also work with stoneware when I want greater stability, allowing the particular qualities of each material to influence how the work develops.
My practice unfolds through five interconnected bodies of work—The Weavers, the Noodles, the Waves, the Weirdos, and the Smashers—each carrying forward my commitment to awkwardness, vitality, playfulness, and imperfection. My approach tends toward accumulation rather than refinement. Instead of perfecting a single element, I build additional layers and relationships among multiple components. Forms repeat and rearrange; colors and patterns overlap; ceramic objects interact with woven forms and painted and collaged walls. Each addition creates new relationships and possibilities, allowing the work to grow through discovery rather than toward a predetermined resolution.
The materials do not always behave as I intend, and these moments have become an important part of my practice. Forms warp, slump, crack, and break. Rather than automatically treating these events as failures, I look for ways to respond. Elements can be repaired, rearranged, combined, or transformed into something I had not anticipated. Imperfection creates an opportunity for another decision.
This process of improvisation and reconstruction continues into the installation. Individual elements remain responsive to one another and to the architecture around them. Color and pattern move between object, wall, fiber, and space, creating shifting relationships and points of view. The installation becomes a form of world-building: a space that remains open to movement, lightness, play, and imaginative possibility.
Scrappy & Happy describes both this way of making and an ethos I try to live by: make do and appreciate what is. Making do does not mean settling for less. It means paying attention to what is actually in front of me and remaining curious about what it might become. A broken form, an awkward relationship, an unexpected result, or an imperfect circumstance can contain the beginning of something else. For me, that openness is an act of optimism—the belief that what already exists might hold the possibility of becoming something joyful.
Biography of Alison Bergman
Alison Bergman is an artist, educator, and community arts advocate living in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom. Her childhood was shaped by frequent moves to new cities and countries, exposing her at an early age to different cultures, ways of living, and social inequities. These experiences fostered an enduring curiosity about people and a belief in the possibility of creating a more generous and equitable world.
In her twenties, Bergman encountered Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which helped give language to ideas that had been developing since childhood—particularly the importance of imagination, agency, and the belief that change is possible. She carried these values through more than twenty years as a K–12 art educator and continues to bring them to her life as an artist and active member of her community.
After leaving classroom teaching, Bergman opened Art & Joy, a small gallery and shop in St. Johnsbury, Vermont. The gallery has become another form of creative practice and community engagement, providing a space to support artists and participate in the cultural and economic life of her rural community. Across these different roles, Bergman remains guided by an ethos of curiosity, joy, and possibility.
Bergman holds a BFA in Film, Video, and Animation from the Rhode Island School of Design, an MAAE from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and an MFA in Ceramics from UMass Dartmouth. She has received the Graduate Fellowship in Community Engagement at UMass Dartmouth and the Learning in Arts & Culture Fellowship at the Vermont Studio Center. She was recently accepted as an Associate Member of Boston Sculptors Gallery.
Website: artandjoyinvermont.com
Instagram: @alisonmbergmanart
