Fly Away Home: Claudia Olds Goldie

January 17 – May 3, 2025

The Zillman Art Museum is delighted to present Fly Away Home, a fantastical menagerie of Claudia Olds Goldie’s sculpted figures. The sculptures are constructed from slabs of white stoneware that are formed into hollow cylinders, shaped from the inside and out, then finely modeled to create their figurative details.  The artist then covers the surfaces with intricate graphite pencil drawings or layers of graphite powder to produce a rich, silvery finish. Olds Goldie’s figures capture strength in stillness and a powerful sense of determination.  Considerable emotion is portrayed on the faces of the characters and conveys a push and pull between reality and dreaminess.  

Olds Goldie’s series of heads represents an intersection between realism, fantasy, and irony. The faces portray individuals with aspirations and anxieties and offer a stylistic nod to the history and culture of portrait sculpture. Since the artist does not work from live models, she is free to employ an intuitive and inventive process that allows the personality of each head and figure to reveal itself as she manipulates the clay.  

Olds Goldie explores pattern and tone with her installation In Concert. By layering graphite designs she creates dimension through divergent motifs. The arrangement of the orbs is unified by shape and form and their abundance creates a dynamic display. These non-figurative pieces reveal the patterns of rhythmic movement through an innovative use of design.