I create work that depicts a shrinking of the distance between fact and fiction: perspectives from memory enriched by my imagination. The articles rendered can be exaggerated or diminished, but they are always tangled together in an order that corresponds with the flux of how things are remembered. These objects operate as reflections of events and relationships—the loss of someone loved, the diminishing of a parent, or the recollections of a lifetime of experiences for example. I imagine much of this work as a poem more than a novel, with the work functioning as conduits to shared reminiscences and imagination.

Pattie Chalmers received her BFA in printmaking in Canada from the University of Manitoba, and her MFA in ceramics from the University of Minnesota. She has exhibited in group exhibitions on five continents, in six countries and thirty-six states and has had ten solo exhibitions in the past eight years, including The Thing of It, at Thomas Hunter Project Space in New York City, the Mudmaid Museum at the Sheldon Center for the Arts in St. Louis, MO and most recently, Like a String full of Knots at the Olson Gallery at Bethal College in St. Paul, MN. Chalmers has participated in over two hundred group exhibitions at locations that include the American Museum of Ceramic Arts, Williamson Gallery, the Everson Museum of Ceramic Art, the Daum Museum, the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art, the Ulrich Museum of Art, Gallery 224, Harvard Ceramic Center, the Canadian Clay and Glass Gallery, and the San Angelo Museum of Fine Art.

Chalmers is a Full Professor at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, where she has taught since 2006.