Encounters

About the Exhibition

Grace Hager's emotive imagining of encounters with nature pulse with saturated color, metaphor, and a palpable sense of awe. Her hand-built ceramic sculptures exist between fantasy and reality, inviting viewers into a contemplative state through nuances of texture and surface. Hager creates charged objects, paintings, and prints that speak to an impulse to preserve fleeting moments—to freeze the ungraspable.

At the heart of her practice is a deep engagement with the natural world—not merely as scenery, but as an emotional register. A roaring campfire, the sun filtering through trees, a glimpse of a wild animal: these are the kinds of encounters that animate her work. While rooted in recognizable forms, Hager sidesteps realism in favor of heightened, subjective expressionism, using color to create a space for poetic interpretation.

Color becomes a transformative agent, injecting everyday imagery with unexpected emotional depth. Citing David Batchelor’s Chromophobia as a touchstone, Hager reclaims a vibrant, high-key palette historically dismissed as unserious or decorative. In her hands, bold color infuses familiar scenes with psychic charge, and invites viewers into a space that is at once joyful, melancholic, and hypnotically alive.

In Conversation with Friday Arts

Friday Arts

What are some themes that you find yourself returning to?

Grace Hager
I've really settled into my identity as a landscape-based artist. The landscape is a throughline of my artistic career, but I've really become comfortable claiming that as a valid mode of creative production in the contemporary sphere. The landscape meets color in my work to create a hyper-sense of emotion.

I'm really interested in feelings of awe and moments in an everyday experience where you sort of break out of the fog and feel a deep sensation, whether that's positive or potentially even more toward the other pole of awe, which is terror.

Color seems an important entry point into your work—can you talk about your relationship to color?

I grew up in a house that was very beige. And so I've always been drawn to very saturated blues, reds, yellows. There's joy in those colors that I want to lean toward.

I was trained in the Albers method. I find David Batchelor's Chromophobia a very influential book. He discusses the stigma against bright color. It's thought of as feminine or unsophisticated or wild or raucous. But for me, it's interrupting maybe a more conservative or oppressive system of aesthetics, in a way I think is quite radical. It's my mode of abstraction.

So if I am making an image of something that is fairly representational or straightforward, by shifting the color, immediately I'm introducing more poetry into that image.

How did you first start working in ceramics?

With ceramics, art meets the everyday and can be a part of your everyday experience. I began working in ceramics when I moved back to New Haven following my undergraduate degree. At that point I thought of it more as a mindfulness practice where I wouldn't say I was really producing art so much as learning the basics of throwing pots. However, through that four-year period I did learn a lot of the technical skills that I continue to use today.

When I returned to grad school, there was a point where my advisor told me to do something completely different, almost something that you don't think of as art to refresh your studio practice. With that spirit, I thought about ceramics. Over that summer I was making a lot of flat, glazed tile forms. Then moving into the fall and my final year, I began to take on more sculptural work.

What were some of those first sculptures?

The first sculptures were the campfire sculptures. In sourcing that imagery I was looking to the landscape for inspiration and was lucky to take a very short trip to the White Mountains. While I was in the mountains, I was seated around a campfire watching the flames. I got caught up in the mesmerizing form and the color and light, and so I worked to create a sculpture that could freeze that moment and create an object that might replicate that kind of mesmerizing experience.

How has the form evolved?

The form has continued to grow in my practice through color. The early sculptures were more naturalistic, lots of browns and oranges for the flames. And as the work progressed, the direction that my studio work took during that time moved towards more unnatural, exaggerated or saturated color.

A perennial question in my practice is where is the line between reality and fantasy or reality and maybe more of a subjective emotional experience. Tweaking the color of a form, but not the form itself, keeps me rooted in one sense of reality while inviting a more metaphorical symbolic or emotional read to the subject.

After making your first fire sculpture, how did you decide that it was a subject you would continue to return to?

I'm thinking a lot in my studio right now about the duality of fire. The early campfire sculptures were received as quite playful and joyful and recreational in the terms of campsites and camping and that kind of engagement with nature. But there's also a little bit of foreboding or ominous quality that neutralizes how cute they may initially appear.

Can you elaborate on that idea of duality?

I get asked a lot about the narrative of my work and I don't know that I approach the work that way. I’m interested in things that offer a dual experience of emotion. So maybe they do feel cute or friendly at an initial viewing but also invite a more nuanced or melancholic kind of read that begins to temper those lighter emotions, and that feels more related to true experience where I might be quite joyful but I'm also maybe thinking about something that is more bittersweet. Keeping all of that in measure helps keep the work feeling closer to true for me.

You used the word cute—is that something you embrace?

I'm more at ease with cute than I've ever been, but it's not actually all of what I'm doing. Cute for me speaks to sort of a pop appeal that an object can have. I think they're quite desirous objects. People enjoy them, but I think some of that also has to do with grander concepts of what it is to contain a campfire, for example. There is something about the ephemerality of it—and fire being sort of non-physical—that making it physical speaks to some level of desire or appeal. It's much more complicated but if cute is how people are called into the work, then I am trying to embrace that.

Can you tell us about the technical considerations for the fire sculptures and how you build them?

Early on, I was sort of just playing with clay and seeing what I could make. One of the pieces that I produced looked a lot like driftwood to me. And so that was germinating as I was thinking about sculptural form—I was really into trees and wood grain has always been a recurrent thing in my practice because it offers this mesmerizing optical pattern.

To make these sculptures, I extrude or hand build tubes of clay and then alter the tubes. Then they are attached and composed into configurations and then there's a lot of carving detailing as the clay begins to dry. Once I'm happy with the form, I let the clay dry to a bone-dry state. And that is where the majority of the painting for these ceramic works takes place.

I'm using a material called terra sigillata which is actually a very traditional material and process that dates all the way back to the red and black Greek amphoras. Contemporary ceramicists have taken similar material and used it to achieve many more vibrant colors—which is speaking my language. I'm applying many thin layers to build up the color and the solidity of the form. Once I'm happy with the painting the work then heads into the bisque kiln to be fired and fully vitrified.

At that stage is there any going back?

There isn't going back but there is adding more. I really think of the ceramics as paintings and essentially those early building stages in clay are me making my substrate. And then, although I'm not using oil paint or acrylic paint, all of the sig work is done in the language of painting, thinking about light and illusion and pattern and color. Once they're fired, I determine if I want to add a cold application surface, whether that's oil paint, acrylic paint, or gloss medium.

How do you decide on the moment to freeze in time?

I don't have a range of the life cycle of a fire, I have more of the peak. For me, in terms of creating many strong emotions, it's about that drama. I'm embracing drama in order to produce feelings, having everything be at this perfect pitch, bubbling energy or potential energy. I'm interested in the tension of that moment, just before things have changed or they're in the process of changing.

What other sculptural work are you exploring?

Alongside the campfires, there are these tall ceramic tree forms. Part of the genesis for that work is seeing what else I can do with this visual language of carved repetitive forms that mirrors tree bark. Also, the physical parameters of the different studios and kilns that I'm working in helped determine some of my output.

As I’ve been working with trees, I've been thinking a lot about the sky. I'm particularly interested in the point at sunset where the sun is going down and the moon is rising and occasionally you can you can have an experience of seeing both at the same time or in close conjunction. The trees became almost like a vessel for that kind of reflected sunset light.

Can you talk about working in different mediums, going between painting and sculpture?

I think of my sculpture and my ceramics as hand-built paintings. So even if I'm making a ceramic work, the majority of the influences I'm looking at are two-dimensional painted works, whether they're contemporary or historic.

Tell us more about your painting practice.

My ideas are still focused on those moments that stand out for me—the mesmerizing headspace that you enter when you're watching a fire but also when you glimpse an animal.

As far as process, I sketch first and then there is an extensive underpainting either in one color or a few colors and then any further coloration is developed in the subsequent layers. When I made Mirage I was focused on having a complete technicolor spectrum in the painting to create awesome feelings—like I have to have every color and really pump it all the way.

Some of the paintings that I've made since feel a little bit more monochromatic and more focused, but it's also about how many different shades of a single color can I get into one image to develop richness. All of my subjects are somewhat singular within the frame or the composition, often very central. I think it's about the interfacing between me and something else in nature that might inspire the work, and then producing an art object with a similar interface between the depicted and the viewer.

In addition to saturated, intense colors, gradients seem to be a recurring motif.

I have shades of synesthesia and responding to color in a sensory way, especially a sound way, and something about a color gradient gives me a sense of sound or a swell of emotion that a flat color does not.

I have also been drawing inspiration from psychedelics and psychedelia, and thinking about the activity of painting as being quite psychedelic in itself. David Hockney has some of this, and I continue to be interested in Amy Lincoln and Josephine Halvorson. Halvorson works with color in a way that you receive her paintings as sort of normal naturalistic but as you approach them, they begin to dissolve into unexpected color like bright-bright blues and pinks and purples that you wouldn't expect for a painting of the forest floor. Amy Lincoln is working with very nuanced steps of color to create a sensation of glowing light from something that that does not emanate from a light source.

The perceptual experience and becoming very aware of the color that produces the image feels quite psychedelic to me. In thinking about all of that, the color gradient for me is quite emotional. It makes you aware of the color creating an illusion of light and might do that sort of psychedelic shift back and forth between the painted image and illusion that I'm interested in.

What does psychedelic mean for you?

I am actually a very sober artist. But for me it's inspiring to look at some of the cultural production from the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. I find a lot of things in common with some of those images—lots of bright vibrating color, contrast in color, repeated motifs from nature. There's also a common ground in the kind of feeling I want to produce which might be like mesmerized, meditative, awesome, or positive.

You spoke about having synesthesia—can you elaborate on the concept and how it plays into your work?

Synesthesia is an experience of sound related to color. For example, if you see a particular hue, like a yellow or blue, you might hear a corresponding tone. For me, something like a cyan blue might have more of a higher register sound associated with it, where a crimson red kind of might have a bass hum. In some ways, I think of it as composing emotional tonality using color based on the way that I experience that kind of multi-sensory experience.

Tell us more about the Mirage painting, from which we're producing a limited-edition print together. It seems to exemplify your thinking about using impressionistic color to create an experience.

Mirage started as an oil painting that depicts a red fox passing between a stand of trees. It's timed at sunset, and so it's this compilation of moments that I find exciting or awesome or awe-inspiring layered together to try and create an image that's even more impactful.

I had originally thought of it as a stand of birch trees, so it began in winter and moved into a spring palette. At that point in the studio I was taking pictures of the sunset every day. That is an ever-current motif in my work, a connection between color and light. It's a moment in the natural landscape where there is a super-saturated color that could create the kind of emotional, awe-inspiring feelings that I hope my work also taps into.

That painting developed very slowly, and was actually a bit of a problem painting. It sat in my studio in its underpainting phase for many months before there was a jolt of re-invigoration and completion of the work.

In those early phases it was all painted in shades of quinacridone magenta. My initial attraction to that color was that it's this very hyper-saturated, rich pink that vibrates the eye but also might relate to a sense of light. So taking it from that monochrome and inviting more of either naturalistic color or more exaggerated color again blends the line of the normal moment of glimpsing a wild animal in the landscape meeting the emotional subjective experience of that moment.

How did you arrive on the title?

I was thinking a lot about the glimpse, and what it is to glimpse either in a physical reality, a moment in time, or maybe a spiritual moment or an emotional moment that comes and goes very quickly.

And so, Mirage is a physical phenomenon. It's a phenomenon of light. But also something that feels fleeting and passing, or even maybe imagined, which I wanted to cultivate in a representation of the natural landscape.

It's drawing upon many moments where I've either been traveling or hiking, driving, and you see an animal sort of streak across your path. So it is channeling the excitement and the specialness of that moment and also the desire of that moment, of I want to see more of these elusive beings or have a closeness to that world.