High Desert

 

We were born and raised in northern Nevada and have a strong connection to this place as home. Although generations apart, we grew up in Nevada’s high desert elevations. This place is ingrained in us. It’s easy to imagine that our tough-girl attitudes about working hard and being resilient have been passed down to both of us through the generations of our families that came before us, enduring to make Nevada their home.

We first met and developed a connection over ten years ago at the University of Nevada, Reno, in the sculpture studio. Though we have stayed in touch over the years, we hadn’t collaborated until now. The resulting piece emerged from a mutual appreciation for each other’s visual sensibilities and resonates with our shared origins.

Without a doubt, the high desert has influenced our reductive visual aesthetic, our deliberate use of color, our attraction to raw natural materials, and our fascination with found things that possess history. There is a certain poetics to all of it. Blanketing bare surfaces with felt, sewing the sky to the land, and casting rugged thistle into delicate porcelain are all gestures full of meaning.

Kara Savant and Tamara Scronce