April DeConick (b 1963, Detroit, MI) is an abstract expressionist who uses fiber and clay as her canvases. She is also a professor of the study of religion at Rice University (2006-). After decades of writing about mysticism and gnosticism, she has found that words often are inadequate to communicate the deepest aspects of reality.  She has turned to art to express this wonder. She creates art to communicate what cannot be said in words, but what must be experienced and felt first-hand about who we are, where we are from, and where we are going.

“My works engage our imaginations by appealing to our sense of touch and embodiment. I play with the intersection between visual aesthetics and haptic sensation, creating tactile artworks that convey ‘hygge (who-gah),’ the feeling of comfort, care, and companionship. I intend my pieces to inspire us to cultivate a culture of care for ourselves, each other, and the planet we share.”

As an abstract expressionist, she embraces improvisation and spontaneity in her hooked tapestries and ceramics, using color, texture, and undulating forms to visually reflect the diffusion of the Flow, Chi, or the Shefa as it interlaces with the natural world and provides us with sites of interconnectivity. The poetics of her hooked tapestries rely on the wildness of long random hooked stitches that break away from the typical flat stitches used to create hooked rugs. The aesthetics of her abstract ceramic surfaces rely on the layering of glazes spilled and painted on textured and stamped clay.

“The materials are my focus and inspiration.”

Her multidisciplinary work oscillates between functional and conceptual art. The artist works at the intersection of fine art and traditional craft – what she calls “women’s work” – contesting the androcentric and patriarchal narratives that still, unacceptably, define and control the art world today.

“When a woman does it, it’s a craft but when a man does it, it’s art.”

Most of her artworks challenge our cultural fetishization of women’s bodies as the natural world which men can subjugate and control. While her pieces are abstractions of the natural world, they also are abstract representations of women’s bodies and couture. They often combine the hard ceramic surface with soft fiber in integrated but hybrid wall sculptures, using form and assemblage to reorient viewers to the uncontrollable power of women.