BIO
In the last decade Pat Lay’s artwork has focused on technological metaphors of the human experience. Her sculptures, made of fired clay, computer parts and other readymade elements, are hybrid, post human power figures that have cross-cultural references and question what it means to be human. In Lay’s collage works digital images scanned from computer circuit boards are transformed into a new matrix. A place, created in response to our world of technological advancement and digital progress.
Pat Lay was born and raised in Milford, Connecticut ; has been a professional artist since 1968; lived in SOHO, NYC for twelve years and has been living and working in Jersey City, NJ since 1981. A graduate of Pratt Institute and Rochester Institute of Technology, Lay is a retired Professor of Art, Montclair State University.
Lay has received two grants in sculpture from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and a grant from the American Scandinavian Foundation. She has been awarded three public art commissions including the installation of a large-scale site-specific sculpture in the sculpture park at the Henie-Onstad Kunstsenter in Oslo, Norway.
She has had solo exhibitions at the Jersey City Museum; New Jersey State Museum; and Douglass College, Rutgers University. Her work has been included in group exhibitions in Japan, Austria, Korea, China, Norway, Wales and Slovakia and at the Jersey City Museum, Newark Museum, New Jersey State Museum, The Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, Montclair Art Museum, The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Everson Museum, and the 1975 Biennial Exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Lay’s work is featured in a number of books including Lives and Works, Talks With Women Artists, Volume II by J. Arbeiter, B. Smith, S. Swenson.