bio
Judi Tavill (b. 1968, Baltimore, MD) is a New Jersey–based artist who uses sculpture and drawing to explore the complications of connection and entanglement. Working across clay, mixed media, and works on paper, she treats line as both the structure of a form and the drawing that covers it. The work suggests how things branch, join, and hold together without becoming any one thing. Tavill is interested in the space between the familiar and the unfamiliar, and in growing comfortable with the in-between.
She received her BFA from Washington University in St. Louis and worked as a fashion designer before spending nearly two decades in studio ceramics. In 2021 she completed a Post-Baccalaureate Certificate at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, which marked her shift into sculpture.
Tavill is the recipient of a 2025 New Jersey State Council on the Arts Individual Artist Fellowship in Sculpture, and her work is held in the permanent collection of the Flint Institute of Arts. She has shown at museums and galleries including the New Jersey State Museum, the Montclair Art Museum, and the Hunterdon Art Museum, and was one of eleven sculptors selected for New Sculpture/New Jersey at the Morris Museum. Her solo exhibitions include Ivy Brown Gallery (New York), Adamah Gallery (Columbus, OH), and the Center for Contemporary Art (Bedminster, NJ).
artist statement
To live is to be connected, in ways that are both beautiful and messy. My biomorphic sculptures, drawings, and mixed-media installations give form to that interdependence, creating entanglements that feel both familiar and unfamiliar.
Working directly in clay lets me build, remove, and revise as form develops. I start by observing connective systems, from neural pathways to social networks, which feed an evolving abstract language that emerges as I build. My understanding of form is rooted in the way this material responds to touch, its capacity for accumulation and excavation, and the way a form can be built outward from within. Coil by coil, forms emerge between my intention and what the clay shows me. My recent forms have openings, folds, and passages that activate negative space, letting the sculpture turn in on itself and open out.
Line is central to both the construction and the surface of this work. The accumulating coil is itself a line moving through space. After firing, I continue to work with line as I cold-finish the sculpture, drawing layered graphite lines alone or tangled with colored pencil over painted grounds. Dense networks of marks connect, separate, and reconnect across the surface, intensifying its movements until line becomes form and form becomes line.
Cold-finishing lets me return to the surface the way a painter returns to a canvas, responding directly to the piece after firing through an ongoing process of looking and drawing. For the past few years, I have worked within the restraint of graphite on a white painted ground. More recently, I have begun incorporating color, exploring how it charges the atmosphere and sharpens the tension of the work.
Clay remains where this work begins, but not where it ends. Drawing on the sculpture led me to work on paper. In the drawings, the same restless mark accumulates until it thickens into mass and thins into light, and forms emerge that I did not plan. The exchange runs both ways: the drawings began in the sculptures, and now they generate sculptures in turn.
Working in modules lets the work grow beyond the size of my kiln. Fired clay sections link or stack, accumulating into pieces larger than any single firing allows, and their cast shadows return the forms to line. I have extended this practice into mixed media, where my installation work lets the drawn line leave the wall as wire and return to it as drawn line again, blurring boundaries between drawing and sculpture. I continue to explore other materials that can carry this language.
Ultimately, the work asks us to stay with what is unresolved: whether something is connected or tangled, known or strange. At a time when so much is reduced to binaries, I am interested in the possibility of coexistence, in finding some peace in the in-between. Complexity is not a problem to solve, but something to inhabit.
