April Wright

Artist Statement
I use humble everyday materials in my sculptures and installations to simulate fragile moments that live in between abandonment and renewal, connecting physical and personal landscapes of home. Themes of enduring interest are ideals of domesticity, fragile narratives, empathy, and loss. In my process there remains ever present, a cyclical act of accumulating, repurposing, and building.
Gaston Bachelard stated that “homes are in us as much as we are in them.” My concept of home represents an ambivalence, as a space that can be supportive and nurturing, and at the same time oppressive and disorienting. Working with traditional sculpture practices in an unconventional manner allows room for new intuitive ways of making to evolve. For instance, hollow paper cinder blocks stand in for emotional boundaries, while shredded clothing found from the inside of a punching bag is gathered and bounded together to form a picket fence.
As an archeologist investigates underground, I investigate the home to see what ordinary materials can bring out relevance and meaning to a history or a story that is now abandoned or discarded. As a maker, I am drawn to material first, then associating and manipulating those materials into metaphors. manipulation and associations creating metaphors with those materials. Whether it be domestic, industrial, or simply discarded.
April Wright is a visual artist and professor from Germantown, Tennessee. She uses humble, everyday materials to connect personal narratives about home and ideals of domesticity. She received her B.A. in Sculpture and Ceramics from Union University and her M.F.A. in Art Studio at the University of Kentucky with a focus in Ceramics and Fibers in 2020. She works interdisciplinary in sculpture and installation art.
Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally in museums and galleries, such as the Wiregrass Museum of Art in Dothan, Alabama and Patricia Sweetow Gallery in San Francisco, CA, Woman Made Gallery Chicago, Illinois, The Mint Museum in Charlotte, South Carolina, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha, Nebraska, and Boom 48hr Student Neukolln Artist Festival, Berlin, Germany. She has been an artist in resident at the 701 Center for Contemporary Art Columbia, South Carolina in 2020 and Mendocino Art Center in Mendocino, California from fall 2020-2021, and the Tend Artist Residency at the Walkaway House in North Adams, MA in 2023. Currently, she resides in Frostburg, Maryland as professor of sculpture and gallery director at Frostburg State University.