BIO

Born in Banff and raised near Edmonton, Corwyn Lund is Toronto-based artist whose Medalta residency marks a return to the warm familiarity of Alberta. Prior to earning an MFA in Ceramic Art from Alfred University, Corwyn Lund studied sculpture at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) with the support of a Canada-US Fulbright Fellowship. After nearly a decade of professional practice dedicated to site-specific, architectural installations, in 2012 he began working with clay as a resident at the European Ceramic Work Centre (EKWC) in The Netherlands. Fueled by successive ceramic residencies at Anderson Ranch in Colorado, Shenkar College in Israel, and The Pottery Workshop in China, Lund’s focus shifted to sculptural, architectural, and experimental ceramics. His recent work establishes uncanny relationships between intense heat, architecture, and photography as a reflection on solastalgia, the distress caused by the mounting environmental crisis. Lund’s ceramic work has been part of group exhibitions at the Benyamini Center in Tel Aviv and The Power Plant in Toronto and been the subject of a solo exhibitions at Toronto’s Zalucky
Contemporary and the Fosdick-Nelson Gallery at the New York State College of Ceramics, and is held in the collections of the EKWC, the Boijmans Museum in Rotterdam, and the Alfred Ceramic Art Museum.

ARTIST STATEMENT

My recent ceramic works establish relationships between intense heat, architecture, and photography as a reflection on solastalgia, the distress caused by the mounting global environmental crisis. Often using large architectural tiles as the surface and support for wall and floor pieces, I strive to evoke the all pervasive, destructive forces of fire, flooding, contagion, and radiation. Current global conflicts and environmental catastrophes are provoking an anxiety about the future of the Earth and humanity that I have not felt since the 1980s growing up under the threat of nuclear conflict arising from Cold War tensions. As a teenager whose political worldview was shaped by the punk subculture that stood in opposition to this and other social and environmental ills, I understood little beyond the gestalt of songs like Crass’ Nagasaki Nightmare. Now, as a midcareer contemporary artist I am using my ceramic art practice and research to grapple with the historic atomic bombing of Hiroshima and the contemporary effects of global warming alike. Glazed ceramic proves an apt medium to do so, given the molecular chemistry and cosmological force of fire integral to the ceramic process, which I choose to make evident in the resulting artworks.

2022 / 2023