Bio

Ingrid Butterer is an artist living and working in Brooklyn, New York.  Her practice is focused on motherhood represented through clay, fiber sculpture, earth art and photo/video/performance. Ingrid earned her BFA from the University of Michigan and her ED.M from Columbia University, Teachers College where she is a frequent lecturer. Her work has been published in Orenda Arts Journal, Quarentine Magazine and Womxn Artist Project.  Ingrid’s work has shown at Lincoln Center, Atlantic Gallery, A.I.R. Gallery, Yamashita Gallery and Kyoto Shibori Museum in Japan, among others. She has been a featured speaker at The Women of Kansai Association (Japan), SLA Gallery,  Gallery at St. Francis College, Brooklyn College and Yardmeter Editions in New York City. Ingrid’s recent endeavors include curating CONSTELLATION: SLA Art Space’s Women’s Invitational in New York City. Her work can be found in private collections throughout the U.S. and Japan.

Statement

My work is often described as visceral. Visceral in the choice and handling of material, deep-rooted in archetypical themes of self and motherhood.

For years as an artist-teacher, I have worked hard at supporting students with articulating their important experiences through the language of material.  We spend a good deal of time discussing the quality of a particular experience and the characteristics of materials that fit those experiences effectively. That “fit” is essential to my own artistic practice.  If it is the process of burning clay in an open pit, bathing sculpture in salty ocean water, pouring milk into an open stream or scratching away at a surface to describe what is going on in my head or in my heart, each choice I make is deliberately designed to reach the viewer at a primordial level.

I have no time for pretense. The desire to understand my internal monologue or my disorienting experience of motherhood in the context of domestic violence; both provoke me to create concrete physical documentation as evidence of the world women move through.