Anna Calluori Holcombe, M.F.A.

Professor of Art and Art History

College of the Arts

2014 Awardee

Anna Calluori Holcombe studies ceramics, a field which is at a pivotal place, where tradition has to adjust to a new paradigm that embraces technology and industrial design production techniques.

Calluori Holcombe has been working with new technologies to create her work. She works collaboratively with digital media artists to create models, scanning natural objects with a handheld portable scanner. The scans are then printed on a rapid prototyping machine. The clay objects made from these models are then built in assemblage fashion.

Calluori Holcombe has published articles in international journals, including Ceramics Technical and New Ceramics. She has lectured on this topic at venues such as the 18th Symposium Paranese in Curitiba, Brazil, the Society for Materials Engineers Rapid conference in Atlanta, and the Materials Engineering Department at Anadolu University during her Fulbright there.

The ambiguities Calluori Holcombe finds in nature give her much inspiration from which to draw. There are unlimited variations of what can seem to be, rather mundane objects. They become objects arranged in a still life to be appreciated away from their original setting. Calluori Holcombe is particularly interested in the juxtapositions she creates. One of these is between nature and current technologies.

In 2010, Calluori Holcombe embarked on a modern version of the 17th and 18th century Grand Tour of Europe. She spent a total of two months researching porcelain, primarily tableware, from both a historical and technical perspective. There is a natural connection of this research to the Silk Road, which became evident in her recent travels to China’s Silk Road and sites in Turkey.

Calluori Holcombe’s work has been collected in numerous major international collections. She has exhibited in many shows, internationally in China, Argentina, France, Croatia, Turkey, and Hungary, and nationally, in cities such as Santa Fe, Chicago, Denver, and Minneapolis.