"Blue Skies, Square on Square tile series"

Phyllis Pacin

"Ironically, after falling in love with the seductive feel of clay in my hands, I have developed a style that involves using the clay in tile form, like a blank canvas to be painted on."

Phyllis Pacin's current body of raku-fired ceramic tile work is worlds away from her background of traditional sculpture and pottery. Her love of two-dimensional design, coupled with a lifelong involvement with clay, has manifested itself in the creation of perfectly flat wall work with a twist. Playing with the space within the picture plane, and the illusions this creates, has become as important as the composition of her subject matter. The result is a unique interplay of two and three dimensions.

She designs her work--arrangements of hand-rolled and textured raku fired tiles mounted on acrylic or wood--as free-hanging pieces. While some are composed of square tiles, more often she works with parallelogram-shaped tiles, which she arranges into architectural compositions that give a trompe l'oeil illusion of three-dimensional form. Some pieces go one step further in tricking the eye by "folding" the forms visually so that they look like actual three-dimensional objects existing in real space.

Pacin's artwork hangs in museums and in public, private, and corporate collections worldwide.