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Travis Townsend Office: Campbell 408 |
Biography 
Travis has studied at Kutztown University, PA (BS), Virginia Commonwealth University (MFA), and Penland School of Crafts, NC. His awards include a residency at Penland, an Emerging Artist Grant from the American Craft Council (2001), a grant to participate in the Emma Lake Collaboration, SK, (2002), an Al Smith Individual Artist Fellowship from the Kentucky Arts Council (2004), and an award from the Virginia A. Groot Foundation (2006). Since 2000 he has exhibited widely in numerous group and solo shows.
Artist Statement
Using a mixture of reclaimed building materials, art student wood scraps, and other household materials, I create curiously interactive devices that play off the forms and function of tools, toys, and appliances. These process-oriented sculptures bear the history of their making, for they evolve from continuously redrawn sketches and travel through many transformations before being cut apart and reassembled. Parts are often transplanted, left behind, or recycled. Through this method of construction and reconstruction, I am able to intuitively build and then, at a later time, make necessary changes.
Embracing the unplanned, my creations resemble animated functional equipment with handles, doors, and openings, but the physical or metaphorical "usefulness" is left to the imagination. Through curious inspection, viewers can patiently discover previously unseen drawings and spaces within each work. In an increasingly commercialized, fast, displaced world, I'm attempting to build idiosyncratic inventions that relate to our domestic environment.
Paintings
These process-oriented acrylic and mixed media on wood paintings have evolved from the preliminary sketches and surfaces of my sculpture. Created through the accumulation of many marks and layers of paint, these paintings are often sawed into smaller compositions, cut apart, reoriented, sanded, scraped, and repainted. They are diagrams of processes and maps of ideas that relate to my daily life and are informed by such "non-art" drawings as carved initials in trees, phone conversation doodles, and the walls of a well-lived-in house. It is this daily record of mark making that fascinates me, for it is an indication of the overwhelming need to leave a visible record of our existence.
Samples of Work
