Eva Masterman graduated from Kingston University in 2008 with a First Class Honours BA in Fine Art, and recently completed her MA in Ceramics and Glass at the Royal College of Art. She has exhibited widely across the U.K. and abroad, including two solo-shows at the William Bennington Gallery. She was the recipient of the 2016 Anthology Art Prize at the Charlie Smith Gallery, and the 2016 Royal British Society of Sculptors Bursary. She also works in a social outreach art collective, collectiveMATTER, which has been selected for the 2016 Tate Exchange Program.
Investigation into material and process led practices through cross-disciplinary workshops, seminars and writing, predicates her art-work. This dual approach of direct research into the boundaries and preconceptions of the visual arts, coupled with her own artistic practice, allows Eva to create a critical discourse that surrounds her own sculptural territory; one that sits firmly in the middle of the ‘expanded field’ of inter-disciplinary, material-specific making and fine art sculpture.
Evoking the ruin, the architectural, the body, there is an attempt to contain and control the transition of material and mental states, creating tension through displacement of the familiar. The ubiquitous nature of clay accompanied by recognisable forms and supporting structures, is used to enhance to the visual interchange and sense of potential flux and instability. The resulting installations become a testament to the colluding nature of process and environment. Using clay as a set of rules and parameters in which to explore, the work endeavours to marry the conceptual with the physical, revealing the bodily realities of working in the studio and what it means, or how we make art.
As well as her art practice, Eva also writes for the online journal cfie.org, and teaches at the Camden Arts Centre and has been a visiting lecturer at Kingston University.