Bonnie Kemske comes to her sculptural work with a diverse arts background. As a young woman she trained in modern dance and ballet in New York City. This training and the sense of body awareness gained from it have been a consistent aesthetic influence throughout her life.

Her undergraduate degree is in religion, her interest being in the expression of the spiritual in secular art. This led her to the Zen Buddhist art form of Chanoyu, Japanese tea ceremony, which she studied in Kyoto and London. Chanoyu is a highly developed and complex art form that centers on the preparation and drinking of thick green tea. The tea is served in a ceramic bowl, which the guest cradles with both hands as he or she drinks. The tactile qualities of the bowl are integral to the appreciation of it, and the handling of the bowl creates an intimacy between host, bowl, and guest, inducing a self-reflective calm. This tactile moment, the moment of drinking tea from what is often an irregular and sometimes rough-surfaced bowl, has been the impetus for Bonnie’s work throughout her professional studio career and in her PhD and post-doctoral research.

Another aspect of her background that has been a significant influence is cultural. For over twenty years she has experienced, contemplated, and tried to find a comfortable position for herself as an American living in Britain. Issues of touch, tactility, and one’s relationship to the physical world and those who inhabit it (e.g., the cultural differences in levels of intimacy) have always been in the forefront of that experience.

Bonnie Kemske says: Like when reading old personal journals, you find that the issues that make you who you are recur, but through different stories and with different answers. Touch, tactility, and the body are thematic threads of my experience, and my work gives me the opportunity to contribute to an understanding of these issues by challenging our pre-conceptions and moving forward through the creation of new tactile experiences.