Based in Kansas City, MO, Maura Wright is a visual artist primarily working in earthenware clay and painted paper. Wright earned her MFA from the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University in 2018 and a BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute in 2013. Her work has been featured in several publications, including Architectural Digest, Surface Magazine, Curbed, and Dwell Magazine. After six years in Montana, she relocated her studio to the midwest during the summer of 2024.

Imagine that the Mediterranean coast collided with Florida in a shocking tectonic shift. French Rococo porcelain and Italian majolica pour into the kitsch beach shops of Sarasota. My work weds high art to low until I can’t tell the difference, until I feel myself acknowledging the staginess of all art, of all life. 

I fell in love with the vessel through my introduction to the history of ceramics - specifically, ornamental vessels and architectural murals. The vessel has become less of an object and more a sculptural subject; a vehicle to expressively decorate through meditative, gestural ornament. My sculptural vessels are obsessively embellished with laurels, florets, dripping glazes, ostentatious handles and embedded shards of thrift store dishes. I pair bold and colorful patterns with a reverence for romantic classical forms. Inspired by the exuberance of the decorative arts and the expressiveness of touch found in folk art, I take historically porcelain archetypes and purposefully re-craft them in terracotta.

I frequently place ceramic vessels and still life sculpture in constructed environments comprised of paintings done on paper or painted directly on the wall. Inspired by interior fresco wall painting, these pairings are meant to be dream-like with a touch of nostalgia for things that never were. Unconcerned with anachronisms, I pull from the grab bag of historical precedents. Taking low-brow elements and mixing in the high, the work dares you to embrace the clash of surfaces or forms or references. The pleasure of the work comes from deft and shifting angles between the tradition of the past and the impropriety and insouciance of the present moment, from questioning the real and the imitation.