Biography
Eva Funderburgh is a sculptor living in Seattle, Washington. While her work ranges from clay to bronze to installation work, the movement and emotional content of her work stand out, regardless of the medium.
While technically a Seattle native, Eva grew up in Kansas and Pennsylvania before attending Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. She graduated in 2005 with a Bachelor’s in Science and Art, with focuses in chemistry and sculpture. Not long after graduation, she made her way back to her birthplace of Seattle with her partner and now husband, Ben.
In Seattle, she’s worked with other wood fire potters and sculptures, becoming part of the regular crew on two local anagama kilns, Santatsugama and Ochawangama. In 2006, she teamed up with five other artists to create Florentia Clayworks, a small cooperative clay studio. She’s also been involved with the Pratt Fine Art Center, first as a student, and then starting in 2014, as a teacher in their Foundry program. She’s especially fascinated with patinas for bronze, due to her background in chemistry.
In 2010, Eva spent five weeks as an artist in residence at the Guldagergaard Center for Ceramics in Skaelskor, Denmark. This inspired her to increase the complexity of her work, leading to both larger sizes and more nuanced emotional content in her sculptural pieces. Denmark also proved to be the start of a renewed interest in installation work. She now has pieces in a permanent installation in a Seattle school, and has displayed temporary installation work in various galleries and a museum.
Now days, not only sculpting in clay, bronze, and installation, Eva teaches workshops in all three as well, and regularly teaches Introductory Bronze casting at the Pratt Fine Art Center. She has work in private and public collections on four continents and twelve countries.
Artist Statement
My work deals with the overlap of humanity and the natural world. I use my simple, emotive animal forms to examine human motives and emotions. Storytelling and the idea of myth plays a very large role in my work, but equally so the notion of biology.
Humans are intrinsically biological and the growth of cities follows the same biological imperative as a blooming flower or growing tumor. I try to examine this notion without pronouncing a moral judgment on it. Hence, my beasts may sometime carry entire civilizations on their back, though the question of symbiote or parasite is left open. I also use biology in my work to examine some of the more base aspects of human nature as my creations hunt, eat, and squabble over prizes.
A recent grouping of my pieces has begun to examine my work’s own nature as constructed form, opening to reveal hollow space inside. This consideration of the physical inside of the sculptures has led me to consider their metaphorical insides. They have turned into an examination of the internal workings of myself and others, and how that relates to the physical shell.