St. Pete, FL

FloridaRAMA Project

L O L, slip Cast Porcelain Clay, LEDs and micro-controllers

For her FloridaRAMA experience installation L O L, Tess used phonetic charts to create forms made inside of the mouth while pronouncing the letters “L” and “O”. This is an expansion of a formal vocabulary that she is currently working with in her practice. L O L is playful and humorous in personifying text often used in pop and tech culture. Arduino code is used to create rhythmic laughing patterns to evoke a high-spirited atmosphere and allude to laughter in the air from the cast of characters at FloridaRAMA.

Bio—
Tess Oldfield earned a BFA in Ceramics from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth in 2019. Her earlier intensive study of classical vocal and instrumental music inspires her work in the exploration of connections between sound, light and the vessel. In her installations, she aims to create transcendent architectural spaces that provide sensory experiences for the viewer using multiple vessels and Arduino technology. Tess was the Studio Coordinator and Chris Gustin’s assistant at Gustin Ceramics in Dartmouth, MA from 2017-2020. She recently relocated her studio practice and currently resides in St. Pete, FL. Tess was awarded a 2020 Individual Artist Grant from the St. Petersburg Arts Alliance that sponsored the installation “Leitmotif” from her series of immersive lighting installations “Kore”.