About the Artist | Nina Borgia-Aberle
As an artist I wear many hats - sculptor, educator, planner, designer, tile fabricator, collaborator, general contractor, and community liaison specialist. With time and experience I have come to more fully understand and embrace the purpose, meaning, value, and relationship of all the roles I inhabit as an artist.
There is a relationship between all the things I do creatively. In many ways I am telling stories with my art and helping others to connect with their own stories. In my personal work I might be reflecting on my past, in my public work I may be reflecting on the history of a site. My deep appreciation of form delights in the natural world. Inspiration comes from diverse sources ranging from a wildflower in cross section to minute details of human anatomy, In all my work I am inviting others to pay closer attention to what they are seeing, feeling and thinking. I am inviting them to make connections, find meaning and celebrate who they are in this mystery we call life.
When I was a girl growing up in New York I dreamed I would follow in my mother's footsteps literally by becoming a ballet dancer. All that changed in high school when my art teacher introduced me to clay. I have never looked back. I received my Masters of Fine Arts from Ohio State University in 1986 and have made my living with my hands since then. Art making has been the vehicle I have used to understand the human experience.
As a ceramic sculptor, forms in nature, tools, and the internal and external human body have inspired me. In addition to making personal sculpture, I started working collaboratively in Ohio's Arts-in-Education program beginning in 1986. As a teaching artist I am able to share my passion about the process of learning. Experiential learning is what works for me and thus I share that with students I work with. I am an explorer forever on the verge of the next wondrous insight, the next deeply moving form, and the next exquisite color that helps me understand and celebrate my world. After watching my slide talk at the beginning of one particular residency, a 12 year-old girl came up to me and said, "I never knew you could like your job."
A one-year teaching position as head of the ceramics program at the University of Arizona brought me to Tucson in 1994. I moved permanently to this city the following year and found myself reinventing how I made a living after my son was born. My first public art project led me to apply for another, then another, and now over a decade later with more than 20 projects completed and many more in progress I feel the role of public artist suits me very well. With public art the beginning point is always reaching out to others to understand the project and community and then sharing my personal perspective. With my personal work it is the exact reverse with the starting point being a desire to explore my internal self and then sharing that with others.
