{"id":21225,"date":"2013-06-06T12:53:10","date_gmt":"2013-06-06T18:53:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=21225"},"modified":"2025-10-23T19:25:53","modified_gmt":"2025-10-24T02:25:53","slug":"colour-maisch-artist-profile","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/colour-maisch-artist-profile\/","title":{"rendered":"Colour Maisch: Artist Profile"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Colour<\/a><\/p>\n

Technically the MFA Maisch is finishing at the University of Utah is in ceramics, but clay makes up just a portion of her work. The objects in Maisch\u2019s studio are a combination of organic and industrial materials, with a mixture of created and found elements. All share a common feeling of having come to exist through some sort of natural evolution rather than having been made by an artist.<\/p>\n

In the studio there are small balls of transmogrified pantyhose filled with smooched fluff, unfired clay, and coiled tube. There are several big unglazed porcelain funnels on tables and their latex counterparts droop from hooks on the wall. Extruded porcelain tubes lie next to sharp bulbous forms like the abandoned exoskeletons odd, angular creatures have outgrown and left. The work is dominated by a neutral palette: old bone, flax, ash, and earthworm tones fill the room, as well as a spectrum of flesh-colored pantyhose, and the black of ink and char. She has been experimenting with chili red bindi powder, which fills hand built sake-sized cups, adding a small percussion of color to the assemblage. The porcelain work is mostly unglazed. She generally likes to see the surface of a thing as it is. Glaze, she explains, \u201ccovers up the intrinsic quality of the material underneath.\u201d<\/p>\n

She says she is always scanning the world for materials, even if not consciously. It might be hiking in the foothills with her dog, or searching the aisles at NPS or Home Depot. \u201cOr if I go into the desert,\u201d she says, \u201cI think I\u2019m always looking. And, I think, it\u2019s not\u00a0looking<\/em>, but\u00a0observing<\/em>, in a sense. Knowing that there\u2019s good stuff everywhere. I\u2019m not looking for anything in particular, but I know it when I see it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Like the moment she became taken with gut. \u201cI was watching Julia Child on her cooking show,\u201d Maisch says. \u201cAnd she was making a p\u00e2t\u00e9, and she was putting over it a stomach membrane that was just this lacy, beautiful thing. And I remember, Steve and I,\u201d (her husband, Steve Maisch, who teaches in undergraduate studies and economics at the U) \u201cwere on a road trip, and I could not stop thinking about it.\u201d Now, throughout Maisch\u2019s studio there is gut encasing various objects: gut stretched around tubes, gut wrapping shards.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve found with a lot of these things,\u201d she says, gesturing across the studio, \u201cthat in my own life, they\u2019re talismans, these ways of creating\u2014I don\u2019t want to say sacred, but these\u2026 wishful\u2026 moments. Or ways of imbuing little bits of magic into things.\u201d<\/p>\n

Maisch is able to infuse even the manufactured items, like the industrial rubber hose, with a kind of wonder.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou change the context, and it\u2019s no longer what you originally thought it was,\u201d she says. \u201cThere\u2019s a potential to re-envision it and its potential as a thing that we interact with.\u201d That is where the magic comes in. \u201cThere\u2019s beauty and potential in all of the things around us. It\u2019s just a matter of allowing ourselves to see it, or framing it for ourselves differently.\u201d<\/p>\n

She develops much of her work through play. \u201cI\u2019ll get something, and I know that I need it, but I\u2019m not really sure why,\u201d she says. And then she starts trying different materials together. For example, she started playing with the nylon stockings and when she stretched the stockings over the porcelain funnel forms she had been working with, something clicked. \u201cThey almost, I mean, I make them, but they kind of make themselves, as well. They sort of say what they need to be.\u201d<\/p>\n

Maisch has a warm demeanor. She\u2019s funny and smart. She wears a blue dress that matches her blue eyes, hair pulled back into a sun streaked deep golden ponytail. In the other part of her life Maisch is the co-owner of a catering business, The Blended Table. She started doing catering work when she was 18. Three years ago her cousin, Emery Lortsher, asked if she would like to be a partner in her business, and Colour jumped at the opportunity. She says that it is challenging running a business and going to grad school at the same time, but that the work is very satisfying and somehow complementary. Even if just for the fact that the two sides of her life require such different ways of thinking. Sometimes after a day of catering she comes home happy and satisfied, but also feeling a bit as if she\u2019d been hit by a truck. Whereas in the studio, she says, she can almost turn her brain off. \u201cIt\u2019s hard, sometimes. Sometimes making stuff is really hard. But also it\u2019s a soft, flowing space,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

She slides between those two sides as she talks about her art, a trained academic analysis, and then a series of faltering sentences and gestures as she tries to put words on the wordless intuitive place the work comes from. But the wordless intuitive place is very important.<\/p>\n