Chris Garofalo

Ceramicist Chris Garofalo highlights the exquisite beauty of the natural world. She reinterprets conventional images of plant and animal life, drawing inspiration from underwater creatures, her own garden, and even from under a scientist’s microscope.

Garofalo is intrigued by the vast similarities in the shapes of life forms existing on land, sea, and air, on micro and macro cosmoses and organisms. Her ceramic sculptures are inspired by those forms whether extant or extinct. Each sculpture is unique, non-representational, beautifully crafted, and exquisitely glazed.

Garofalo’s work also explores the unpredictable, the unrepeatable and the accidental potential of form in an emergent evolution. Her exhibits become their own ecology—a “playground of contingency”—presenting a subtle reminder of our responsibilities as the single most dominant species on Earth today.

This artist and longtime Chicago resident renders her original take on evolution and art in delicate sculptures that capture the perpetually evolving nature of nature itself. In fact, Chris herself has evolved from printmaker and graphic designer and has been living in Chicago since 1980.  She has exhibited both locally and internationally, including at the Garfield Park Conservatory in Chicago and the Nouveau Musee National de Monaco, and is currently represented by the Rhona Hoffman Gallery in Chicago.