About

Casella_TimeCritterBricks — Casella Time Critter Still 1

Incorporating Photography, Video, and 4D installations, Emily Casella’s Ceramic Sculptures examine how our obsessions with 2D records and media affect our ability to function in society three-dimensionally. Her work examines the tension of wanting to be social and mentally/physically isolating.

Emily Casella is an Educator and Artist with an MFA in Ceramics from Herron School of Art and Design and a BFA from Indiana University Northwest.

Growing up in the early 2000s there was a lot of sheltering from surrounding neighbors and being part of a Montessori school, anything outside the immediate world around her was found through television, books, and then the Internet in 2008. During undergrad she investigated how television can create mental ideas about life, creating the installation of Absorption Preserve 2016. Watching the beginnings of YouTube, and participating in it herself from teenage-adult life, the idea of socializing virtually was not something new. Now the world is catching up with Social Distancing in 2020. Park of Infinite Connections 2019, her MFA Thesis examined individuals’ attitudes and relationship to being social, virtual connections, and being remembered.

Inspired by Irrealism, Emily creates unique figures who reveal particular human emotions and beliefs that are caused by an awareness of the present, past, and/or future. Her latest works are grounded within the rules of the 21st century, with small aberrations to critique and question what humans have invented for themselves. Her work plays within the internal and external worlds that individuals simultaneously live.

When she is not covered in a clay or teaching college art courses, she tends to photograph collections and create metadata for the Museums’ Archives, Galleries, and Libraries.

You can follow her elsewhere: Instagram @Emybookworm, and YouTube Emily J Casella and Emybookworm’s Cinema.

If you would like one of the Ceramic People or an Installation to be shown at your school/library/museum/art gallery/public building/establishment email Emily to schedule emilyjcasella@gmail.com