Former Lover Letters

The Blue House presents Joshua Paul Hebbert’s Former Lover Letters featuring multi-media artworks that illustrate the versatility and the perception of feelings through language, and also the gaps between the intended meaning and the interpretation.     

About the artist: Joshua Paul Hebbert is a sculptor living and working in Philadelphia Pennsylvania. He recently graduated from the University of Colorado, Boulder with his Maters of Fine Arts. After growing up in rural Western Nebraska, he attended Creighton University in Omaha and received his BFA in Ceramics. He has worked for a variety of cultural craft institutions, including Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts, Guldagergaard International Ceramic Research Center, Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts, and the Museum of Contemporary Craft. He has exhibited his work nationally and internationally. He is currently an Artist in Residence at The Clay Studio in Philadelphia.

From the artist: My studio acts as a space for me to both escape and explore the world. By pulling on personal, social, and constructed symbols, I remove them from direct, cultured meaning. I weave them together to create a new fabric that is at once personal and universal. It serves as a critical look at the way knowledge is acculturated and understood.

Recently, this has centered on communication—the words that travel from one mouth to another’s ear. We can hide behind language to mask our feelings or use it to reveal our vulnerabilities. In my work, I have solidified those words by translating them into plaster, ceramics, concrete, and paper. And yet, through the use of coded, symbolic language, meaning still evades the viewer. The space between what we say and what we mean has always baffled me. “Former Love Letters” explores that chasm.

Exhibition ran October 14-31