Annie Duncan

Annie Duncan makes larger-than-life ceramic sculptures and paintings that explore the symbols of femininity and the talismanic power they carry. She considers everyday things associated with the femme/female body—from cheap commercial objects to art historical imagery—and uses them to address contemporary subjects such as bodily autonomy, femininity, self-realization, and desire. 

Duncan hand-builds her ceramic sculptures with slabs to create large-scale forms that are deliberately distorted. Once it is bisque-fired, Duncan treats the clay surface as a canvas, using glaze to paint saturated, often illusionistic renderings of the form’s interior and exterior, creating a false transparency. This trompe-l’oeil effect references traditional still life painting, the language of cartoons, and the aesthetics of digital consumer culture. 

Most recently, Duncan has been building giant ceramic flowers in bottles that serve as an allegory for the female body and psyche. These megaflora pieces reference flower symbolism and use enormous vessels as metaphors for how we nourish, contain, and delude ourselves in search of an instant remedy. 

This work confronts the vulnerability of our innermost yearnings, which moment-to-moment can feel attainable or completely out of reach. Duncan’s sculpture and paintings are monuments to the bittersweet nature of longing, striving, and failing—the ever-tipping scales of our expectations versus reality.

Annie Duncan (b. 1997, San Francisco, California) makes paintings and ceramic sculptures that explore femininity, symbolism, and art historical references. Leaning into her affinity for collecting, sorting, and obsessing over objects, her work finds humor, heartbreak, joy, and meaning in the jumbled world we inhabit. She received a BA from Vassar College in 2019 and an MFA from California College of the Arts in 2023. In 2024 she participated in residencies in at Lighthouse Works (Fisher’s Island, NY) and Anderson Ranch (Snowmass, CO). Annie was a featured artist with Plunge Towels. She has shown her work at Saint Joseph’s Art Society (San Francisco), Good Mother Gallery (Los Angeles) and Johansson Projects (Oakland), Moosey Gallery (London), among others. 

CV

Disposable razors, oversize IUDs: Annie Duncan plumbs intimacy of everyday objects | January 3, 2024 by Mary Corbin
“With both paint and clay, artist Annie Duncan evokes nostalgia in everyday feminine objects. A tube of lipstick, a hair clip, a perfume bottle, all stir up emotion within the context of the familiar and the symbolic in our lives. With humor and poignancy, Duncan plumbs how these intimate objects, often way oversized in scale, can conjure a particular joyful—or heartbreaking—moment.” LINK

ARTNews: The Best Booths at Untitled Art Miami Beach, From Potato Sculptures to Ominous Razors | December 6, 2023 by Maximilíano Durón  “…At first glance [Annie Duncan’s] works are playful—intentionally so. But they also reflect the artist’s own anxieties about the societal pressures that women often face: rendered at an ominously large scale, the sculptures turn small objects associated with femininity and beauty nightmarishly big…”  LINK

Nothing Without Desire: Annie Duncan’s Objects Can’t Live Without You | July 13, 2023 by Katherine Jemima Hamilton
“By macerating a historical painting genre with the aesthetics of consumer-identity capitalism, Duncan insists that the history of women’s relationship to things must be studied, as modern capitalism attempts to sell us back our identities in pretty prim packages.” LINK