Three more artists that I am familiarizing myself with.
Jason Walker is an artist who works with the narrative, mostly discussing nature and how technology changes our views on it. He creates ceramic sculpture of animals in unnatural, industrial settings and further expands his ideas with illustrative surface imagery, usually involving humans. This results in dualistic tension about the man made and natural world. His work reminds me very much of Sergei Isupov in that they utilize both two and three dimensional story telling within the same piece.
Another artist who deals with issues of the natural world is Cindy Billingsley. She both paints and sculpts with ceramic material, using an emotive and gestural style in which she explores instincts, desires, and moods. She draws from her own experiences in life and communicates her emotion through the facial expressions and body posture of her human and animal forms. She uses creatures that aren't always appealing, but creates beauty in what is feared or misunderstood.
Carroll Dunham's artistic career has spanned over more than four decades. His drawings, paintings, prints, and, now, sculptures have transitioned from amorphic, flowing, gestural works with many layers of color and line work, to blatant images of sexuality and violence. He is another artist which pushes the boundaries of beauty and grotesquerie. Looking through his enormous portfolio I saw connections to the likes of Francis Bacon, with his visceral, dark imagery, and Robert Crumb, who infuses a lot of violent humor and satire into his work. The colors that Dunham currently uses are somewhat brighter than his previous works. He is also exploring more of the feminine than masculine imagery, working with the bather.