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BIOGRAPHY |
Tony Moore is represented in international museum collections, including the Guggenheim Museum and Brooklyn Museum, USA and Yorkshire Museum and Derby Museum, UK. The British-American artist is the recipient of a Louis Comfort Tiffany Award, CAPS Grant and Sally and Milton Avery Fellowship. After 25 yrs of work in NYC, Tony Moore moved 50 miles north to Cold Spring in the Hudson Valley. In 1998, on a mountaintop property above the Hudson River he established “East Mountain Studio”, where he built an 18 ft hybrid Anagama-Norborigama Japanese style wood-fire kiln. Moore now fires his unique clay sculptures during week-long events. Tony Moore received his MFA in Sculpture from Yale University. “Within Moore’s work there is both a substantive depth and a quietness implying an optimistic future where such transcendence is possible while at the same time there is a stark and honest confrontation with the endless repetition of pain and suffering born of blind ignorance. Moore’s works are arduously fired for one week in his hybrid Noborigama (Japanese style) wood-fire kiln, which allows for the maximum flexibility in firing temperatures and optimizes both controlled and accidental impact from ash and other by-products of the wood-firing process. The transformation of clay through the alchemy of heat in this process is metaphorically linked to Moore’s interest in all aspects of human existence, the actual demonstration of the interaction between flesh and spirit. Tony Moore’s ceramic sculpture is at once heroic and confrontational, elegantly and delicately detailed, minimalist and substantial. Above all, it is a truly unique and beautiful expression of the compelling desire for freedom in a world which is increasingly brutal and limiting not only to artistic expression but to human life itself." Vivian Goldstein |
“Lyricist in a time of war, Moore offers both the loveliest of studies in quiet clay and something like the portrait of blind militarism. Moore is able, both as a witness to war and as a poet who cares for small but telling things. The poet looks at how fire moves across clay surfaces and deposits marks, how the impress of a leaf before the firing leaves behind a fossil-like, detailed image, how a strangely eloquent Sign of the Cross can emerge from a complex technical sequence of superposed tiles, clay slip, and the heat of an extended, six-day kiln firing. The multi-part work called “Meditation” reflects the interests of a poet and an inquirer into the meeting place of technique and image-making. But all of that is transformed into a new experience by Moore’s medium, the wood-fired kiln. In “Meditation” one comes upon Moore’s lyricism, free of our conflicted times and exercising itself in the realm he knows to be his home ground: clay and the wood-fired kiln.”
Roger Lipsey |
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 Tony Moore's Hybrid Anagama-Norborigama Wood-Fire Kiln |
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