Bio
Loren Rubino is a ceramic artist whose sculptural figures explore vulnerability, strength, protection, and the complicated process of becoming a woman. Her artistic practice has developed through a lifelong engagement with creativity, beginning with writing, performance, and art education and later expanding into art therapy and counseling. Rubino spent many years helping others find their voices, first as an art teacher and later through her work with women and girls. As a mother, she became particularly attuned to the roles of advocate and protector, experiences that eventually became central to her own artistic practice.
Working intuitively with clay, Rubino creates rounded, bodily forms that she describes
as a family of women and girls. Soft, tender forms are combined with spikes, collars,
chains, texture, and armor, creating a visual language of both adornment and defense.
Through these figures, she considers how we protect ourselves while remaining
sensitive, open, and capable of holding space for others.
Artist Statement
My work explores the tension between sensitivity and strength, vulnerability and protection, and the complicated process of becoming a woman.
For much of my life, I helped other people find their voices before I was ready to find my own. As an art teacher, I learned how powerfully art could give shape to emotions that were difficult to express. Later, through my work in art therapy and counseling, I witnessed the experiences of women and girls and the ways they carried pain, expectation, responsibility, and resilience. As my own daughters grew, I became their advocate, spokesperson, and protector. In many ways, I was learning to become the voice and protector I had once needed for myself.
My work with clay eventually developed its own voice. The forms begin on the wheel, and I try not to decide too much in advance, allowing each piece to reveal what it wants to become. I am drawn to rounded, bodily forms that feel soft, tender, and vulnerable. Through trimming, throwing, coiling, and slab-building, the figures gradually develop their individual character.
As the forms take shape, softness meets gestures of protection: spikes, collars, chains, texture, and armor. These elements suggest defense, but also weight—the responsibilities, worries, expectations, and experiences that accumulate over time. A collar may begin as adornment, something pretty, but can grow spikes and chains until decoration becomes protection. Some of the smallest figures receive only a starter collar. They are not yet ready for all that protection.
I imagine these figures as a family of women and girls: mother, protector, grandmother, innocent child, sassy teenager. Each has a different capacity for what she is asked to carry. Together they reflect the ways women stretch to hold pain, responsibility, and the needs of others, sometimes beyond what is comfortable. I am interested in the possibility of living within both truths—not abandoning sensitivity in order to become strong, but allowing sensitivity itself to evolve into a kind of strength. How do we protect ourselves while preserving our softness?
