Over the past two years, illustrator and animator Aran Quinn has been falling in love with the medium of clay-his evocative works explore themes of love, desire and the tension between strength and sensitivity. He tells Alix-Rose Cowie about trusting himself, and the long but therapeutic and liberating process of creating his sensual ceramics.
Ceramic sculpture is Irish illustrator and animation director Aran Quinn’s newfound love language. Recently relocated to Marseille with his wife—painter Taylor Franklin Quinn—after 13 years in the thick of New York City, the slower tempo has granted him pockets of spare time to spend with hands full of clay. The act is unbound from the pressures of his commercial illustration and animation deadlines, and the self-imposed expectations he battled pursuing other mediums like painting. After trying clay for the first time, he discovered he could make freely, and felt so elated, he skipped out of the room. “I’m just full-on obsessed,” he says.
It’s about finding a happy balance between what I want and what the clay is telling me to do.
Quinn’s sensual sculptures of buff bodies, alone or pressed together, plunging into the fleshy folds of a flower, or being kissed by butterflies are musings on love, lust, physical joy and the tussle between machismo and vulnerability. They come straight out of his daydreams to be shaken up with other visual references he might see on any given day. He calls his style a “cocktail” of inspirations: depictions of idealized physical beauty in Renaissance art, R.Crumb’s erotic cartoons, a screenshot from a Cardi B music video, the uncanniness of a Hieronymous Bosch painting.
Everything is made with a sense of playfulness. The sculpture of a nude devil riding a snail, yanking its feeler, came about while subletting a friend’s home, where every night Quinn was made to face a devil puppet hanging over his side of the bed. “I was having these weird nightmares the whole time,” he says. Moving the culprit to another room didn’t help. “I thought, ‘This is so silly. I’m getting in my head about this. I’m just going to put a devil in a funny situation to see a nice side to this guy,’” he laughs. “But he is slowly going to get me.”
A natural with clay only two years in, Quinn credits his progression in part to the kindness of the ceramicists he’s met. Working out of studios in Amsterdam, New York and Marseille, each has felt like an informal artist residency. “No one keeps secrets. They’re all lovely and helpful,” he says. The fluidity and sense of motion in his still, very heavy, pieces is an advantage from his years in animation. Hours of life drawing cultivated a three-dimensional awareness in his work, but even though he might animate a character turning around to show different angles, it’s ultimately on a flat plane. “The clay forces me to evolve the illustrations,” he says.
I like big feet and hands and bums and muscles, but I also love the elegant, delicate features of a face.
As a starting point, he takes photos and videos of himself, or his wife, from every angle in the poses he wants to achieve, and makes sketches from there. These are just a guide as the clay itself dictates the possibilities. Sometimes gravity literally takes a sculpture into a new direction while it’s drying overnight, or a figure is off-balance and needs bigger toes. “Luckily, I already love exaggerated proportions; I like big feet and hands and bums and muscles, but I also love the elegant, delicate features of a face,” he says. “It’s about finding a happy balance between what I want and what the clay is telling me to do.”
Making a real-world object also gives Quinn the satisfaction of playing with scale—as much as the kiln will allow. “I just love the touch and feel of it, the weight of it, the size of it,” he says. He’s started working with whole blocks of clay, carving the shapes out instead of building, or coiling, them up. Once they’re done, he hollows out the middle so that they’ll bake through. To avoid kiln explosions, they also need a hole for hot air to escape through, which in Quinn’s pieces is usually a cheeky belly button, a mouth or an ear.
Like his hand-drawn animations, making ceramics is time-consuming; working and then waiting—sometimes for weeks—for the clay to dry. Once the sculptures are fired, they’re glazed with color which looks nothing like the eventual color that emerges after firing. Glazing unleashes a series of lucky surprises or “Oh my god, I hate it” hues until you have it figured out. The metallic finish Quinn uses now came from refiring a “mistake.” With nothing left to lose, he doused the whole thing in a silver luster overglaze, which came out better than anything he’d hoped for.
This has been such a nice way to selfishly go with what I want. It’s been fun just to express myself.
Discovering sculpture has been a lesson in trusting himself, and compared to his client work, making art that’s open to interpretation has been something to get used to. “It makes me feel way more excited, but also way more vulnerable,” he says. “Obviously I love hearing other people’s takes, especially if I’m inspired by their outlook, but this has been such a nice way to just selfishly go with what I want. There are no clients. It’s been fun just to express myself.”
After the weeks it takes to complete each sculpture, Quinn likes to underthink their titles. “It doesn’t need to be that serious,” he says. “I made it with a bit of love and humor so let's just throw a funny thing on it. After all this time and consideration spent on it, it’s kind of a fun way to then move on to the next one.”
