Joe Paushel received his BFA in Sculpture/Intermedia from West Virginia University and his MFA in Ceramics from Miami University. His work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally. Paushel is a recipient of the Ohio Art Council’s Individual Excellence Award and his pieces reside in collections at the National Museum of Slovenia in Ljubljana, Slovenia, the Mark Rothko Art Center in Daugavpils, Latvia, and the Cluj Art Museum in Cluj- Napoca, Romania.
To navigate vulnerable feelings, I make many molded copies of written-off objects and cast, deconstruct, and hand-build on them using many professedly unrelated construction techniques. Ceramic glaze, nail polish, and a found plastic curler can now exist within the same framework. The discarded becomes celebrated; At times, decorative and bodily forms break down, become fluid, and resemble many things at once. In other cases, they seem to get caught up in a game of dress-up or pretend play while trying to fit into surroundings. Eventually, they find themselves negotiating new categories on and off the wall as the decorative grotesque.
