About the Artist

Savanna LaBauve is a ceramic artist based in Carbondale, Colorado. With a background in painting and drawing, her practice has evolved over the past six years into a deeply tactile exploration of form, material, and process. Her work investigates repetition, memory, and transformation through hand-built ceramic forms that balance structure and fragility. 

About Echoes

The Art Base is pleased to present Echoes, a solo exhibition by Carbondale-based ceramic artist Savanna LaBauve, on view May 8 through June 6, 2026. An opening reception will be held on Friday, May 8, from 5:00 to 7:00 PM, with an artist talk at 5:30 PM.  Echoes is a sister show to Orbit, opening a few weeks later at Seesaw Gallery in South Denver; together, the two shows thematically explore the idea of constellations and their points of intersection. In LaBauve’s practice, echoes are the reverberations of previous choices and ideas, returning from somewhere else slightly anew — distorted by time and experience. The connective tissue is what gets left behind, and how that memory shapes what comes after.  

This exhibition is sponsored by Karen White Interior Design, and we are grateful to our 2026 Annual Exhibition Sponsor, Alpine Bank.

Present in this exhibition are what LaBauve calls “portals” — rectangular forms built around a deliberate absence, a cut-out at the center that draws the eye inward. Some of these portals feel like longstanding caverns, others are suspended in their forward momentum, a snapshot in time. The portals carry a sense of struggle: to puncture primarily, but also to preserve the space between. As the mass around them presses in, there is a sense of vulnerability in how they resist the weight of the clay. The work suggests that an absence is contingent: a space can is best perceived when it is in danger of collapsing. These sculptures ask the viewer to consider the space as the subject — a thin threshold between what is, what was, and what could be.    

A recurring theme in the work is bifurcation, where one becomes two, like trees branching or rivers forking. In the series of pierced sculptures that resemble baskets, this plays out through a dialogue between object and shadow. A cyanotype, a sun-printed photographic record of shadow, captures the outline of one structure, and that shadow becomes the blueprint for the next. The process repeats, as each shadow inflects and distorts the form of the next sculpture— a process LaBauve likens to memory. Solid and inanimate become interchangeable, as the work moves forward, alternating between directions — the shadow sometimes leading the form for a change.   For LaBauve, the work is formed by pinch and touch, a slow process of mark-making with an emphasis on remaining a physical record.  

The exhibition opening also includes a participatory artwork and public event, Textures of Topography, on Friday, May 8, from 5 – 7 PM at the Art Base gallery. Visitors are invited to make barefoot impressions in clay, adding their marks to those already there. Over the course of the event, these layers will overlap and change one another. The finished piece will be fired and returned to the gallery later in the exhibition, creating a shared record shaped by many people.