Sometimes the most important posts get stalled in Cfile’s queue and either do not get published or appear much later. One such example is a book and exhibition review of Geert Lap: Specific Objects. Its is exceptional, visually documenting ceramics’ greatest minimalist, who died in 2017, superbly, rationally and beautifully Dutch in its design, with a unique photo concept. 

Erik and Petra Hesmerg spent years traveling the world to document Lap’s colorful, serene works in private and public collections. In addition to faithful, sharp studio images of the work, we get to see Lap’s pots as they live today in various private homes.

It would be almost perfect but for an unfortunate attempt by one of the two essayists to locate Lap in an academic realm. The first essay by Titus M. Aliens captures Lap’s career succinctly. Its title, ‘Is it a vase or is it art,’ is unfortunate and outdated after more than a decade of ceramics being embraced in the fine arts. “Why not both,” I can still remember Lap saying. 

The real damage is done by Ernest van Alphen’s essay ‘The Specific Objects of Geert Lap’ that gives the book its mistaken title. No doubt the author was trying to promote Lap’s art to a higher station – positioning him in the Minimal canon with Ellsworth Kelly (who was an enthusiastic collector of Lap’s work), Carl Andre, Donald Judd and André Volten–but in the process he revealed just how blind he was to Lap’s essence as an artist.

Let me add that I was Lap’s dealer in the US for many years, was close and had great love for him as a person. He was one of the most remarkable and ‘pure’ artists with whom I have worked. In full disclosure, this relationship is dealt with at some length in the book by Aliens. 

As a result, I know Lap’s feelings about the conceptual world that van Alphen suggests was his true calling. I have witnessed Lap stand and leave dinner parties when art theory began to dominate conversation. My argument is not that Lap cannot be the specific object that the writer suggests but that he was first and foremost a potter. And his objects were first and foremost, pots. 

The assertion by van Alphen that his pots are not pots but are ‘specific objects’ because they did not have the anthropomorphic structure of the vessel–no belly, collar, neck or foot, is simply ludicrous and defies the evidence the book gives of the opposite. It would have infuriated Lap. 

Before all else, Lap was a sensualist and the body, deeply erotic in its understatement, was at the core of his aesthetic. This writer’s blind ignorance of what a pot is, its glory and its majesty, simply disqualifies him to write about Lap and his art. 

With that said, this 272-page book should be, for its visual record at least, in every library. It was published by Nai0101 Publishers, Rotterdam in separate English and Dutch editions and a luxury limited edition was also produced. The editions were modest but some copies are still available from Amazon.

-Garth Clark 

Images that follow are drawn from the exhibition Geert Lap: Specific Objects that the Design Museum De Bosch presented from June 1 – August 18, 2019. 

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Of the 72 countries in the world with anti-gay laws, 38 of them were once subject to British colonial rule. Responding to these colonialist gender laws, Losing Venus seeks to place contemporary discrimination, which is still affecting the lives of many around the world  (Cfile’s recent feature on Leilah Babirye visits a contemporary consequence of these rules), at the heart of one of the cultural centers of the country which exported it, examining their impact through the lens of sexual identity and gender fluidity.

The title is a reference to the idea of love and gender, but also references the purpose of Captain James Cook’s voyage in 1768– to measure the transit of the planet of love, Venus. The installation comprises four main parts located on the busy, bazaar-like Lower Gallery (first floor) of the Museum; The Prints (Bow-Fronted Case), The Dolls (Puppet Case), The Banners and The Cook Service (Didcot Case) which is the main focus of this post. 

Do download the book that accompanies the exhibition, it is essential to comprehending the depth and perspicacity of this show.

To offer more perspective on this fascinating exhibition Garth Clark and Matt Smith spoke:

Was the cathedral space reinstalled for your show or were the only changes making space made for your art to be included? 

The cathedral space was not reinstalled, and one of the biggest issues was working out how to create an exhibition in a space that was already jammed full of objects.  The case with the ceramic plates and the one with the dolls are often used for temporary displays.  The wall with the screen prints is actually a false wall erected in front of a wall of kites and other objects – it was decided that this created less stress on the objects than taking them off display.  The two large banners were custom made for the space – I ended up printing on a mesh that is used to hide scaffolding rigs on building projects – I wanted a material that could be seen through and allow light through…and I also liked the metaphor of the ethnographic museum being under reconstruction.

Was the Cook service the genesis of the exhibition? Was the initial show less ambitious than it became?

The question about the Cook service is a really good one.  I find the idea of colonialism so complex and multifaceted that it seemed logical that any response to it would also have to be layered and multifaceted.   The starting point for me, for the show, was seeing a map of the British Empire in the 1920’s placed next to a map where it is currently illegal to be gay, which lead to me investigating Cook’s voyage to Tahiti, and BINGO, found out that he was traveling in order to map the Transit of Venus….an expedition to understand the movement of the goddess of love.

The Screenprints developed at the same time as the Cook Service – the photographs are one of the few places that people – rather than clothing and objects – are still present in the museum.  The gridded background used by Victorian photographers visually mapped with textile works I have been doing, and speak to the museum’s ability to collect, catalogue and show material culture, but all too readily erase love and lives lived.  So, in answer to your question, the show really came about a whole – very much a direct response to the absence of LGBTQ lives in the ethnographic museum, and an unpicking of any Western notions of the West being more tolerant of LGBTQ lives than other places in the world.

What are the sources for imagery on the service plates. European classical art is clear but where did the more eccentric images come from? 

The plates use two sets of images – the pink images are all European images of Venus, the goddess of love.  The brown images are all taken from the “Atlas to accompany Captain James Cook’s account of his voyages to the Pacific Ocean in the years 1886-1780” held in the Met Office and Archive. The book is a series of prints based on drawings made by botanists and crew on Cooks’ voyages. The pink images are overlaid onto the brown images – European myths obscuring and hiding scientifically recorded ways of being/living and loving in the South Pacific. Again, I wanted to question European enlightenment notions of western scientific truth vs non western ways of understanding, living and loving; and visually represent the epistemicide (destruction of existing knowledge) that occurred as Western ideas of sexuality erased non western ideas.

In a way, I was looking for (queer) love in the museum, and trying to work out why it was absent. It’s argued that mourning is love with nowhere to land, so the iconic Chief Mourner’s costume from Tahiti, which is in the museum (and was collected by Captain Cook) was a natural jumping off point

Hope that helps, it’s quite a dense show to unpick.

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When you look at the Pluto Ware some people only see pollution, darkness, and grim and then other people—like myself—see a kind of strange dark beauty. 

-Happy Price

I make sensual work. The use of my work is to lead to an experience that makes life more interesting or enjoyable, like listening to music, or reading poetry.[…] I’m trying to get feeling into my work, like joy. Sometimes I want to have an ominous quality, so that it has an edge, and humor in the form, too, if possible.

-Ken Price

New York–Ken Price: Pluto Ware at Matthew Marks Gallery features 24 ceramics and works on paper made between 1993 and 1996. Price called these works Pluto Ware, a pun on the word pollution. The factories spewing dark clouds and the ominous oil slicks in brilliantly colored landscapes in the Pluto Ware reflect Price’s unique aesthetic while also raising awareness of the effect of industry on the American landscape. 

As early as 1964 John Coplans wrote that Price’s work “invokes to a remarkable degree a strange interplay between the joyful and the ominous” and praises Price’s “physically brilliant” use of color as “dark, murky, very elemental and primordial.” 

The exhibition, the first public outing for Pluto, emphasizes that as much as we feel that we know the work of Ken Price, there are still facets to his art that have not been shown or fully explored. We can only hope that Mark’s next reveal is going to be a comprehensive survey of Price’s erotic and full-frontal XXX wares. 

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The exhibition brings together five large-scale paintings with freestanding clay sculptures in the gallery’s flagship exhibition space. Entirely white, the restricted palette of the paintings develops the powerful simplicity of the raw, elemental materials—clay, sawdust, and pigment—that create the dense surfaces of the artist’s richly textured, monochromatic paintings. Sodi mixes the materials and throws them down onto a flat canvas in a gesturally energetic process that draws upon both creative intuition and chance. As the layers of material dry, structures form without the guidance or intervention of the artist, creating splintered ravines that recall primordial topographies and the fissured landscapes of his native Mexico.

In this series, Sodi calls particularly upon the work of Joan Miró and his three paintings titled Peinture sur fond blanc pour la cellule d’un solitaire (painting on a white background for the cell of a recluse) which are housed at the Joan Miró Foundation, Barcelona, where Sodi lived and worked for a decade. The atmospheric qualities of the color create, according to Sodi, “a feeling of warmth, calmness, and repose.” On Miró’s works, Sodi has said, “The paintings are just a thin black line made in a single gesture on a huge white canvas. I always admired them: wondering how Miró, with one stroke, was capable of doing something so powerful and beautiful.” 

The exhibition coincides with the publication of a new career-spanning monograph published by Rizzoli, as well as several off-site and institutional projects including an exhibition featuring new black pigment paintings at CAC Málaga and a monumental sculpture Marble Muroat Casa Wabi, the artist’s foundation in Puerto Escondido, Oaxaca.

The Kasmin show is partnered by an exhibition sited on a once teeming commercial concrete parking lot two blocks south of Pioneer Works. Perfect Bodies speaks to, in artist Bosco Sodi’s words, “silence, contemplation and the passing of time—the small things in life and our relationship with the earth.” The installation consists of large-scale clay spheres and cubes made from local clay fired in the artist’s studio in Oaxaca, Mexico, which made the long journey by road across the Mexico-US border to Red Hook. A longtime resident of the neighborhood—itself named after the tone of its own clay soil—Sodi is known for his use of raw and organic materials to create textured paintings and objects.

Sodi’s ongoing dialogue with nature and landscape, shaped by his interests in Japanese aesthetics and Abstract Expression, puts himself in the lineage of both Arte Povera and Land Art—two post-war movements which emphasized, respectively, radically simple materials and an integral relationship between art and earth. As Spanish author Juan Manuel Bonet remarked in the artist’s 2020 eponymous monograph, his three dimensional works reconcile an interest in minimalism with the practices of Mexican heritage. 

On this topic, curator Dakin Hart further writes:

At his place in Oaxaca, Sodi hand forms large geometric sculptures from clay and fires them in a makeshift kiln on the beach. Cuboids in different formats recall the scale and how-did-they-do-that-craft of cyclopean architecture across the ancient world. While spheroids, each formed by eye in a landscape of unbelievable things, might be the petrified remnants—or organic vanguard—of a Jurassic invasion. The past seeding itself into the present, a starting point for nature’s revenge.”

The third related program is an event from Studio Bosco Sodi and Kasmin, Tabula Rasa, a public artwork enacted over a single day on May 23, 2021, Tabula Rasa began at dawn in Washington Square Park, New York, with the installation of 439 small-scale clay spheres. 

On view from 9am–1pm, the artwork began a second phase at 1pm, when New Yorkers passing through Washington Square Park took home a single clay sphere from the installation, a gesture which allows each person to become a part of the performance. At sunset, once each of the works has been claimed by the participating public, the performance came to  close. 

The clay spheres comprising the artwork will be handmade by the artist, symbolizing one day of the COVID-19 pandemic’s duration. Bringing indigenous Mexican agricultural practices to the United States, the spheres are vessels for new life, containing within them three types of seed—corn, squash, and bean—which sustain and nourish one another, finding an equilibrium that provides balanced sustenance. A potent metaphor for the necessity of cooperation and mutual assistance in times of need, these symbiotic plants encourage reflection on our own interdependence and reliance on both one another and also, crucially, on the natural world we inhabit. 

Those who take the spheres home will be able to plant them in soil, activating another phase of the work during which the seeds will germinate and continue on into the cycle of life and death. Loaded with symbolism concerning new beginnings, transformation, and creative possibility, Sodi’s Tabula Rasa is an offering, a gesture that acts to bring together the diverse individuals that make up the city’s community as New York embarks on a second year of uncertainty and disruption. 

Text and images courtesy Kasmin Gallery, Pioneer Works and Studio Bosco Sodi. 

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The history of Norwegian ceramics is marked by close ties to Denmark and northern Germany. In the south of the country, a red-firing clay is available, which was used to make low-fired pottery. Tingleff consciously places herself in this tradition and uses the expressiveness of earthenware, which – in contrast to the smooth, highly valued porcelain – creates a closeness to the everyday with its captivating simplicity. 

An encounter with the ceramics of the Danish architect and designer Thorvald Bindesbøll (1846-1908) was formative for this. His vessels with their freely painted, abstract ornaments inspired her to find her own language in this underestimated field of ceramics. 

At the core are traditional, everyday utilitarian ceramics. Tingleff enlarges plates, platters and bowls into powerful monuments [think ‘massive’]. In this way, they become a tribute to the women who cared for the good tableware and proudly presented it on special occasions. “I want to honor all the hands that carried this crockery to the table, and the same hands – often female – that had to wash it and put it away,” she says.  

With a spontaneous hand, Marit Tingleff paints the plates with colored engobes with the freedom and context of twentieth-century painting. She does not decorate.  The oversize liberates the painting, which emerges here not from the wrist but from the body.

She washes the speckled, poured and painted layers of slip off the wet clay several times. In a rhythmic process, a sensuous patination gradually emerges, an interweaving of the many stories told at kitchen tables. That is part of the works conceptual identity. 

The Nordic landscape is more direct. Tingleff decided early on not to use imported clay, but only the available, local clay Her observations of patterns or color moods in nature are transformed into landscape paintings. In this way she brings the outdoors indoors. On the one hand, she addresses both sublime experiences of nature and environmental catastrophes. 

It should be noted that her largest works here, however, have been realized with clay from the Westerwald. To this end, she visited the deposits of the company Goerg & Schneider in 2016 and personally selected the material. 

Another working group are her double-walled objects, reminiscent of kitchen utensils such as stoves or sieves but abstractly so, references to table culture, but is embodied in autonomous three-dimensional form. 

The enigmatic character of these forms prompted the Danish art critic Poul Erik Tøjner to then call them “Tingleffs”. For the first syllable of this surname actually means “thing” in the Norwegian language and is thus perhaps it is the best way to describe their strangeness. 

Text, edited, and images courtesy of Keramikmuseum Westerwald.

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Dream-like, as if invisibly hovering above the scenery, their perspective complements the fantastical scales of hidden worlds, secretly tucked away from plain sight. Without a direct connection at first glance – a couple embraced in bed or sheep grazing in the field, solitary or among others in the office – the sentiment that seems to enclose each figure and placement in their surroundings is that of quiet solitude. A solitude that peacefully pervades the mind, drifting and reaching spheres of its own making.

Like thought bubbles, each vessel, each scenery, seems like the dream of another, a myse-en-abyme of thoughts. The vignettes aren’t specific narratives but rather depict the invisible passing of time. Routine, monotony, and boredom fill up the space in between the precisely placed office desks, while people at the beach doze off into daydreams and an empty dwelling holds the memories of times past and a waiting pet. Enveloped in their own thoughts, their isolation seems both burden and chance. In light of the circumstances of the last two years, Jaeger’s sculptures remind us that the mind is capable of creating its own gateways, holes, and caverns of imagination.

Writing in the ArtGuide, Lisa Yin Zhang states that regularity and monotony are also a dominant theme in the work:

“… not least in the gridded structures that dot the room. In one vessel, a figure sits fully awake, its arms wrapped around its legs, in a dormitory or shelter filled with sleeping figures as if freshly wrung from a nightmare. In another, figures are arrayed in identical desks and chairs. Indeed, whether these structures enclose a sense of safety, solitude or loneliness varies—see, for instance, the sad scene held within a skinny structure that few would deign to trek. Along with the mottled quality of these fired scenes—as if they are half-dreamt, not fully made—they suggest a metaphor for the human body or mind: the warrens we make for ourselves in our own unknowable interiorities. 

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On June 30, 2021, Design in Dialogue welcomed Detroit-based ceramicist, sculptor and designer Ebitenyefa Baralaye whose glazed stoneware portraits were on view as part of the gallery’s annual participation at Design Miami/2021 and a commanding presence. His work explores cultural, spiritual, and material translations of form/objects, text, and symbols, interpreted through a diaspora lens and abstracted around the aesthetics of craft and design. ‘I have been thinking about the encoded nature of faces,’ Baralaye says,‘the way facial features represent not just one person, but a community, a society, and a culture.’ 

The large busts feature characteristics that have been rendered in a free-flowing, abstracted clay line. the body of work acts as a vehicle through which to offer reflections on Baralaye’s experience of being a black man in America, while traversing universal realities of the collective diaspora, in particular struggles with mental health and well-being.

Born in Nigeria in 1984, Ebitenyefa Baralaye spent his early childhood in Antigua and is now based in Detroit, where he is currently an assistant professor and section head of ceramics at the College for Creative Studies. His work was also included in the group exhibition, A New Realism, curated by Glenn Adamson at Friedman Benda, New York, in the summer of 2021. 

Writing about Baralaye’s most recent body of work – the tall, anthropomorphic vessels – in the exhibition catalogue essay, Adamson notes: 

“There is a clear reference, in these works, to the typology of the African-American face jug, which dates back to the mid-19th Century; it was likely derived originally from ritual figures and containers made among the Kongo peoples of central Africa, forcibly brought to America. with this allusion comes a huge weight: enslavement and its attendant tragedies of suffering and erasure. Baralaye is facing up to this history. but he is also looking outward, and forward.”

“These objects, then, are portraits on multiple registers simultaneously—of the self, of family, of the black community at large. ultimately, they address the very notion of identity formation, which may be specific (he acknowledges a correlation between his use of dark, iron-rich terracotta and the black body) but is also transcendent, a shared human experience, beyond racial and cultural difference. We have become more aware of collective consciousness than we were previously.” 

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The Anton Refregier mural that ornamented the original SEIU building, is memorialized with a replica at the entry-level lobby. The mural depicts important times that showcase the milestones in the SEIU’s fight for labor rights, inspiring the consequent rooms in the building.

Speaking to the New York Times Adjaye noted:

“The way I usually work is to dive into the history and trajectory of the organization and the physical history”. In examining the King Labor Center he fell for the mural, “It had a power, and was a relic of hope from the 1960s and ’70s.” with its bond to 1199’s aspirations as well as to Refregier’s embrace of the social justice mission in much of 20th-century art.

Refregier was born in Russia in 1905 and immigrated to the United States, where he studied at the Rhode Island School of Design and with the artist Hans Hofmann. He gained notoriety for a set of 27 murals, titled “The History of San Francisco,” which he painted in the lobby of a post office. It drew ire from fear-mongering anti-communists for portraying some of the city’s worst excesses, including an image of a white man beating a defenseless Chinese laborer during anti-Chinese riots. The work is now a protected landmark.

The original mural was mounted on a cement block wall and its fragility and scale made moving it impossible, so Adjaye commissioned a replica. Stephen Miotto, a glass artisan based in Carmel, was consulted. He recognized the work immediately because he had taken over the studio of his godfather, Carlo Rett, who created the original work with his two partners. His Miotto Mosaic Art Studios, working with partners in Spilimbergo, Italy, used similar techniques and much of the same glass tiles that Rett had used.

The New York Times explained that reproducing the mural unlocked for Adjaye an idea for bringing the rich history of the union into the new headquarters using similarly monumental form. The Union had shared Adjaye a trove of photos with Adjaye from the union’s history of hard-fought battles to improve the lot of members:

Instead of framing them and hanging them on the wall, Adjaye decided to turn the photographs into large-scale artworks — at floor-to-ceiling mural scale. He knew of the tile factory Cerámica Suro, in Guadalajara, Mexico, which has frequently worked with renowned artists, and asked its owner, José Noé Suro, to reproduce those 80 photos in tile at the desired scaleby digitizing the images and transferring them to the glaze on two-inch square tiles.

“We were commissioned to work on what the public floors would be like for members and new people coming in. I wanted to unfold this incredible story of the SEIU throughout the public space as a kind of permanent gallery of where the history has gotten to,” says Adjaye.

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iThongo, meaning “ancestral dreamscape” in Xhosa, refers to the medium through which messages (uYalezo uLwimi lwabaPhantsi) are transmitted from the ancestors. As such, it is an essential energetic link between the past, the present and the future, and the vital connection that fuels Dyalvane’s artistic practice and spiritual being.

The artist states: “My intentions with developing an extended body of work under the title iThongo is to highlight a gathering of dreams, seated in the soul, held by the spirits of our ancestors. Symbols are visual tools harnessed to more effectively impart meanings within messages – codes, if you will – that aid stories. The language of dreams is symbolic and therefore realized as uyalezo, messages from our ancestral spirits.”

iThongo comprised 18 sculptural stools, chairs and benches, exhibited in the custom of Xhosa ceremonial gatherings, in a circular arrangement around a fire hearth and herbal offerings. Hand-coiled in terracotta clay, their voluptuous, rounded bases give rise to sculptural backrests stretching up to almost a meter tall. The intricate form of each is based on a single pictogram or glyph from a series of close to 200 symbols that Dyalvane has designed to denote important words in Xhosa life – such as entshonalanga(sunset), igubu(drum), umalusi(herdsman) and izilo(totem animals) – and which also relate to the natural world and more universal human themes and concepts.

Dyalvane’s symbolic lexicon has been an ongoing project, born of his interest in preserving traditional Xhosa knowledge, cultural practices and language. The symbols began as calligraphic ink drawings that he has codified over the years, dating back to the work he produced for his ground-breaking solo show at Friedman Benda, Camagu, in 2016. Their debossed forms also emerge from and dissolve into the sculptures’ clay surface, an effect created using tools such as carved stamps and linocut tiles. His coded language thus becomes embedded into both the form and the skin of each piece.

Taking their inspiration from both Dyalvane’s personal memories and various African artefacts, the seating objects are low, sitting close to the earth – the ground revered as an ancient portal for ancestral communion. Their forms are curved and spherical, echoing the traditional rondavel structures and kraal enclosures in which livestock are kept. Circular geometry is believed to facilitate a free exchange of energy in Xhosa spiritual practices (as it is in many other belief systems), in keeping with the organic shapes found in nature.

A series of interdisciplinary collaborations that Dyalvane initiated with other artists broadened the exhibition’s scope.  Sound healer and musician Nkosenathi Ernie Koela produced an immersive composition combining traditional instruments and sounds created by the artworks; Sisonke Papu, an Umtata-based poet, traditional healer and co-founder of the ISPILI Network in the Eastern Cape, wrote about Dyalvane’s use of symbology for the catalogue; and textile artist Onesimo Bam made a collection of garments hand-painted in indigo dye for him to wear for the ceremonial presentation of his work to his village and to gift to his elders.

Learn more about Dyalvane in Cfile

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The artist fled Uganda in 2015 after being publicly outed in a local newspaper. In 2018, she was granted asylum in the United States with support from the African Services Committee and the New York City Anti-Violence Project.

Central to the exhibition is Babirye’s new series of ceramic works depicting figures that are imposing in scale. Babirye creates the works by coiling and molding the clay by hand, gradually building the shape and height of the sculpture. After the work is fired, Babirye begins in a painterly fashion to splatter, drip and splash the work with glaze using unorthodox methods. Upon witnessing her artistic process, American art critic Jerry Saltz commented, “It is important to break the rules in ceramics more than in almost any other medium, because it is alchemy and of the earth and is belly-magic.”

Babirye’s visceral large-scale wooden sculptures are whittled, welded, burned and burnished. The works are embellished with “jewelry” of found materials such as cans, nails and wire. Babirye’s choice to use discarded materials in her work is intentional – the pejorative term for a gay person in the Luganda language is ‘ebisiyaga’, meaning sugarcane husk. “It’s rubbish,” explains the artist, “the part of the sugarcane you throw out.”

While specific titles of her work profoundly reference her traditional Bugandan kinship system, Babirye imagines and creates her own community. By employing the term “kuchu”— a “secret word” of Swahili origin that those in the queer and trans community use to address each other — Babirye playfully imagines an alternate history unified in its support and protection of its people. The vividly colored paintings on paper in the exhibition are portraits of real and imagined subjects from her native Uganda. Also presented are ceramic wall-based masks which are bathed in lustrous, painterly glazes and adorned with wire and found objects.

Describing her practice, Babirye explains: “Through the act of burning, nailing and assembling, I aim to address the realities of being gay in the context of Uganda and Africa in general. Recently, my working process has been fueled by a need to find a language to respond to the recent passing of the anti-homosexuality bill in Uganda. “You can be in prison if you’re even caught with a person talking about gay issues Gay in Uganda means the risk of life in prison” she explained in an interview in The Guardian.

The Guardian notes that: 

There’s an irony Babirye relishes in showing her work in the UK. Before the British colonized Uganda in 1894, bringing Victorian Christianity with them, no one cared about same-sex activity. Even King Mwanga II, who was ruling before the British protectorate, was bisexual. It’s tempting to think that Babirye’s work alludes to a pre-colonial, indigenous Ugandan sculptural tradition, but she says there isn’t one: “The only sculptures we have are just ceramic ware for cooking, or spears for fighting wars.” The masks, meanwhile, are a West African thing (Uganda is in the east) used in her work to nod to those friends forced to hide behind them, for fear of hostile exposure. “You’re always running, trying to be safe,” she says of her life being a lesbian in her home nation

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Like joyful music locked in the sensuous embrace of its stringed sanctuary, Ngozi-Omeje Ezema’s recent ceramic art installations evoke imageries of a well-orchestrated symphony in which hundreds of suspended terracotta leaves construct the musical notes of its harmonious melodies. 

Ezema’s Leaf series highlights her ongoing exploration of the leaf motif as an expressive visual element rich in affective metaphors. For the artist, the leaf motif represents a state of being; a transient element whose materiality symbolically dramatizes rites of passage and its associated conditions of liminality. In her recent works, the material properties of leaves are used as formal and narrative handles to address issues relating to womanhood. 

In its congregated and suspended state, the leaf motifs act as both the messenger and the message. They not only simulate forms, they also disrupt, define and activate spaces. Ezema’s installations can quickly shift from a state of stasis to that of dynamic movement. They also project a radical aesthetic that draws attention to infinite possibilities riding on the wings of experimentation. 

Ngozi-Omeje Ezema represents the new generation of contemporary Nigerian ceramists who infuse modernist sensibilities into an age-old traditional art form. Her approach to the clay medium mirrors the footsteps of other Nsukka trained ceramists like Chris Echeta, Ozioma Onuzulike and Caius Onu, whose works radically challenge long established notions that locate ceramics art within the limiting frame of its utilitarian function. 

Ezema trained as a ceramic artist at the Department of Fine and Applied Arts, University of Nigeria, Nsukka. In 2009, the same year she completed her Master of Fine Arts (MFA) programme in ceramics art, she was offered a teaching appointment at the Nsukka art department. For the past decade, she has combined art teaching with a vibrant studio practice. Ngozi-Omeje’s training at the Nsukka art department strongly impacted on her artistic development. Her exposure to the culture of experimentation and exploration which drive the creative philosophy of the Nsukka art department opened up her mind to the possibilities of creating art using unconventional methods and commonplace materials. 

Also, her pedagogical experiences with seasoned ceramists like Ozioma Onuzulike and Vincent Ali, who taught her at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels, played key roles in shaping her artistic sensibilities. On a more profound note, Ngozi-Omeje acknowledges the influence of El Anatsui on her art.1 Anatsui is unarguably one of the most prominent and most influential artists of the Nsukka art school. His art practice has had a proselytizing influence on several generations of artists who trained in the Nsukka art department. 

Anatsui’s occasional visits to Ngozi-Omeje’s studio provided invaluable creative stimulus that significantly benefitted her studio processes. For instance, in her installations, we find resounding echoes of the technique employed in El Anatsui’s bottle top installations, which entails using multiple units of a material in ways that aim for the “aesthetics of the critical mass.”2

Although Ngozi-Omeje has explored unconventional methods that upend traditional use of the clay medium, her suspended ceramic art installations, a compositional strategy which she first explored during her graduate studies, have become her trademark signature style. The art of suspending objects in space has been critically explored by numerous artists. Alexander Calder is considered a pioneer in this field, having begun hanging art as far back as the 1930s. 

Notable suspended sculptors whose works may have inspired Ngozi-Omeje include Jae-Hyo Lee, who composes works of astonishing scale and beauty using rocks suspended with strings, and Sean-GhiBahk, who has extensively worked with charcoal. Omeje has created quite a number of works using the suspension technique. These include Up and Down ( 2009), Fishers of Men (2009), Imagine Jonah (2009), Think Tea, Think Cup (2010), She Bleeds (2010), Life on Strings (2011), Placenta (2014), Against all Odds (2015) and In My Garden there are many Colours II (2016). 

In 2018, she undertook her most ambitious installation project so far. The installation comprised a herd of nine elephants which the artist used symbolically to memorialize personal experiences. Eight of the elephants represent the living members of her family. The ninth elephant, separated from the group but still watching over them, alludes to her departed father, whose accomplishments, personal traits and titular name find figurative endorsement in the attributes of an elephant. 

In Ngozi Omeje’s Leaf series, the leaf motif — which the artist used as a modular design element in her elephant project — is again deployed as a critical tool for advancing the formal, aesthetic and thematic geographies of her art. In the artist’s words: with respect to the varied tones of the terracotta leaves which comprises off white, light brown reddish brown and dark brown tones, the artist explains that the tones are achieved by firing the clay forms at different temperatures.3 

Very dark tones are produced by covering the bisque fired clay forms with sawdust and setting it on fire. The stringing process is carried out in a methodical manner. Using multiple strands of suspended fish line, hundreds of perforated leaf motifs are stringed together at predetermined levels and positions to simulate vases of different shapes and sizes. In contemplating her suspended vases, our experience and understanding of what a vase is and the function it performs, are radically subverted. Her works are structurally dynamic. 

At the slightest disturbance, the suspended vases can shape shift and are also capable of producing musical sounds as the terracotta leaf forms make contact with each other. In addition to her installations that allow for three-dimensional viewing, Ngozi-Omeje also explores works that could be mounted on the wall. This adds a new dimension to her compositional structuring and expands the contexts in which her works could be viewed and experienced. Beyond its aesthetics, Ngozi-Omeje’s suspended vases are infused with a social vision that interrogates the gendered landscape of her cultural environment. 

The burdens that women bear in relationships, their physical attributes — as well as experiences that define their position in society — are symbolically wrapped around the physical and functional attributes of a vase. In the works Subjugation, Freedom and Extinction, the structure and placement of the smaller vases contained within the larger vases articulates Omeje’s visions of womanhood. Ideas relating to motherhood, subjugation, oppression, indifference, conflict, resilience, resistance, togetherness and freedom are framed using a formal language that is as sensuous as it is evocative. In engaging Ngozi-Omeje’s recent body of works, we are made to experience the passion, industry and experimental energy which she invests into her art. 

We are equally drawn into an environment that reveals in an ennobling manner the seamlessness and awesomeness of artistic imagination. Borrowing from Sylvester Ogbechie’s characterization of Nsukka School art, Ngozi-Omeje’s art projects a radical aesthetic that speaks the “language of sublime awe.”4 

Dr. George Odoh is a Senior Lecturer in painting and drawing in the Department of Fine and Applied Arts at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka.  

1.In my interaction with Ngozi-Omeje Ezema during a studio visit, she recounted the many roles that El Anatsui played in advancing both the conceptual and experimental components of her art. 

2.Ozioma Onuzulike used the term ‘aesthetics of the critical mass’ to describe how Nsukka artists assembled individual pieces of materials that were similar yet varied in forms, colour and texture in ways that initiate a chain of aesthetic experience in viewers. 

3.Ngozi-Omeje Ezema gave this explanation regarding her use of the leaf motif during my visit to her studio on January 3, 2021. 

4.In his essay, “From Masks to Metal Cloth: Artists of the Nsukka School and the Problems of Ethnicity,” Sylvester Okwuonudu Ogbechie uses the term ‘language of sublime awe’ and ‘radical aesthetics’ as stylistic markers of Nsukka school art. The aesthetic regime of this style reflects dialogic encounters between indigenous knowledge and local/global sites of artistic production.

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The last two years we have lost a number of the collectors of ceramics whos passion and connoisseurship for modern and contemporary ceramics were vital in the rise of ceramics to its current status as art: the George E. Ohr collectors, Marty and Estelle Shack; Sandy Grotta (housed in a domestic temple by Richard Meier), Alan Chasanoff (whose collection now lives at the Mint Museum of Art, Charlotte), and Bob Ellison who will be featured in the next issue (part of his gift to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York is currently on view). John Driscoll whose eye for early studio pottery in particular, was unequalled, adds to this distinguished list. A selection from his collection went on sale yesterday in a joint auction by Phillip’s and MAAK in London (see the accompanying Marketplace feature by Garth Clark about the record making event). Below is a short touching tribute by Glenn Adamson.

Like many vital and flourishing things, John Driscoll’s ceramics collection began with an egg. The year was 1976, when he was a doctoral student at Penn State. In one of those fortuitous turns of fate that sometimes shape people’s lives, he happened to be a graduate assistant at the university museum when its visionary director, Bill Hull, curated a show called Twenty-Four British Potters. John, asked to unpack the crates, promptly fell in love. Despite his limited budget at the time he quickly acquired pieces by eight of the potters, including the great Lucie Rie.

There was another pot that captivated him, but at $180 simply seemed out of reach: a speckled white ovoid with a sharply articulated two-stepped rim, and a celestial blue interior. It was by Liz Fritsch, best known for her dazzling patterned vessels. In this early work, she already demonstrated her absolute command of volume and profile, a sublime serenity. John had to have it. After agonizing for a while, he took the plunge (like a lot of other collectors, he knew he was one when he got in just over his head). It remained a personal favorite in his collection, together with a postcard Fritsch sent to him bearing the image of three perfect bird’s eggs on its cover. The career of a connoisseur was hatched.

John told me this story — and many others, just as memorable — during the preparation of Things of Beauty Growing, an exhibition at the Yale Center of British Art and the Fitzwilliam Museum, which drew substantially on his collection. His involvement in the project was extraordinarily generous, all the more so because John had always kept his interest in ceramics more or less private. This was partly for personal reasons — he wasn’t the type to seek the limelight — and partly an ethical matter. As the head of Driscoll Babcock, New York’s leading gallery of historic American fine art (and the oldest continuously operated gallery of any kind in the city), he felt that he should keep his collecting activities out of the public eye, and quite discrete from his activities as a dealer.

At one point, when discussing the philosophy of the Japanese mingei movement and its preoccupation with the figure of the unknown craftsman, John said to me that “genius can be anonymous.” He conducted himself accordingly. At once deeply erudite and totally self-effacing, he assembled one of the world’s great collections in any artistic category, quite quietly, without making a fuss. His vision was at once simple and, given the relatively marginal condition of studio pottery in the late twentieth century, somewhat radical. He set out to acquire the very best objects by the very best makers, and let them speak for themselves.

Now, we have the opportunity to hear that story in full. The auction catalog, The Art Of Fire: Selections From The Dr John P. Driscoll Collection affords a comprehensive view of twentieth-century British studio pottery. Each object, selected with rigor and discretion, marks out a position within a complex field of aesthetic achievement. The governing dialectic is the familiar one between modernism and traditionalism, with Lucie Rie and Bernard Leach seemingly exemplifying these two competing values. A closer look, however, reveals the falsity of this opposition — or at any rate, the degree to which British potters achieved a union of these seeming alternatives.

Text by Glenn Adamson courtesy of Phillip’s and Maak. Photograph of John Driscoll by Emily Driscoll.

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Héctor Zamora Gama vibracoes centrifugas Galerias Municipais-Capa 2019

“Using modest material”, says Max Hollein, Director of The Met, ”Hector Zamora’s Lattice Detour interrupts and refocuses how visitors interact with this beloved space, situated atop The Met and surrounded by the Manhattan skyline, creating a meditation on movement, transparency, and interference. Manifesting itself as a protective wall, curved artwork, and permeable screen, Lattice Detour is a transformative, charged, and timely intervention.”

Sheena Wagstaff, The Met’s Leonard A. Lauder Chairman of Modern and Contemporary Art, added, “Well known for his site-specific installations that re-articulate public spaces and the built environment, Zamora challenges and redirects our expectations of the Cantor Roof Garden as a social space, asking the visitor to navigate a barrier to the open view beyond the parapet. Constructed of bricks composed of Mexican earth, using local labor and traditional processes, Zamora’s lattice wall is a poetic metaphor writ large, and a critique of the social, political, and economic considerations inherent in its making.”

Zamora uses the wall, which seemingly dictates how one moves around the space and also screens the view of Central Park and the Manhattan skyline, to create a response in viewers that communicates the impact of barriers: thwarting access to open, expansive outlooks on the world. Yet this wall is created for reasons beyond hindering.

The bricks, stacked eleven feet high, have been turned to their side to show their perforations; with that simple artistic gesture they let in light and allow air to flow through, referencing celosía walls—the latticed structures found in vernacular architecture of the Middle East, Africa, Iberia, and Latin America that provide shade and ventilation.

The wall’s basic unit—a terracotta brick made of Mexican earth—is an ancient building material that relates more closely to the natural environment of the park than to the steel skyscrapers rising high on the horizon. As visitors navigate around the wall’s gentle arc, they notice the tactility of the structure’s materiality as well as the geometric patterns and shadows cast by the lattice.

These elements suggest that the work’s role as a partition is equivocal. Through the grid of its openings, the gravity of the massive wall turns into a sensual and ethereal mesh. It is as if the wall itself is beckoning us to look through to the far side. In this way, Zamora invites us to reconsider the panoramic view and the implications of obstruction and permeability within a social space.

Text and images courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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The Gardiner Museum’s exhibition RAW, that opened on March 5, 2020, features the work of four leading artists who are pushing boundaries with unfired clay: Cassils, Magdolene Dykstra, Azza El Siddique, and Linda Swanson.

The Gardiner commissioned new installations from each of the artists, exploring themes that range from trans visibility to the sustainability of human population growth. What the works share is an emphasis on clay’s physical and metaphorical connection to the earth, our bodies, and the passage of time.

The Gardiner commissioned new installations from each of the artists, exploring themes that range from trans visibility to the sustainability of human population growth. What the works share is an emphasis on clay’s physical and metaphorical connection to the earth, our bodies, and the passage of time.

In its raw, unfired state clay is an unconventional medium in visual art. Archeological examples survive, but the widespread use of raw clay, rather than fired ceramic, is a recent phenomenon. RAW explores how artists today are using unfired clay in innovative and entirely new ways, particularly as a time-based medium.

Each installation is taking shape on site, and evolved over the course of the exhibition through factors like exposure to moving water. The works represent individual ecologies, constantly in a state of flux or becoming, revealing new developments and surprises with each visit. The public is encouraged to return throughout the run of the show to witness the evolution of the works.

The Gardiner presented the highly-anticipated world premiere of a new performance work by Cassils titled Up To and Including Their Limits. Paying homage to the late feminist icon Carolee Schneemann, Cassils used raw clay to reimagine Schneeman’s historic performance piece Up To and Including Her Limits from a trans and non-binary perspective.

Suspended from a harness in a plexiglass box with walls covered in thick raw clay, Cassils launched their body back and forth, clawing, swinging at the walls, and hurling chunks of clay to the floor. As they removed swaths of clay from the walls, Cassils created “windows” through which the audience could peer, engineering voyeurism into the work itself.

The remnants of Cassils’ performance, including the plexiglass structure, harness, clay, and video documentation are on view in the exhibition.

Magdolene Dykstra takes inspiration from microbial forms of life, contemplating the delicate balance between symbiosis, or mutual support, and all out domination of the host. Her new work Polyanthroponemia visualizes our presence on the planet as an infestation. Large growths of raw clay

appear to seep from the walls of the exhibition hall, the dry surface and earthiness evoking an emergent life form and transforming the sterile ‘white cube’ into a petri dish. Dykstra’s installation will continue to grow, or spread, over the course of the exhibition.

In her largest and most ambitious work to date, Azza El Siddique asks how loss, memory, and the multiple fractures that result from a single event can impact us. Measure of one draws from the visual and symbolic language of an ancient Egyptian ritual temple built for Tirhaga (Taharqa), a Nubian pharaoh of the seventh century BCE. As a network of pipes and pumps drips water onto seventy-five unfired clay vessels arranged on a metal structure, they will erode and transform, dissolving the boundaries between materials and states of matter.

TEMPLUM OF A PRECIOUS THING OF NO VALUE, A SHAPELESS THING OF MANY SHAPES by Linda Swanson consists of four water-filled membranes that hang above a pristine field of powdered clay, slowly seeping onto the topography below. Swanson uses bentonite clay, which is capable of taking on many forms, akin to a human stem cell. The clay will crack, congeal, and change colour as it is exposed to drops of water over a three month span. Swanson’s primordial clay landscape invite us to consider our place in the universe and how ominous climactic events predict the future.

Text and images courtesy of the Gardiner Museum.

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Both putative vessels and abstract sculptures, her works are ceremonial and hint at the origins of function. Composed in elemental materials of English red clay and water, her seemingly effortless sculptures are months in the making. Odundo does not use a pottery wheel, but rather hand-builds her vessels with coils, an age-old technique she learned in the early 1970s from Nigerian women potters. Through a careful process of smoothing the surface and adding slip of the same clay, the British artist manipulates her medium when the clay is both soft and hard, alternating between symmetrical and asymmetrical forms.

Once the clay is leather-hard, Odundo burnishes its surface with stones, polishing tools, and gourds to obtain a high-gloss finish. These instruments leave their own residue on the surfaces, or a careful cut around the lip. The first pots out of the kiln maintain her trademark orange and display deep, smoky, iridescent blacks that are more painterly in this year’s works than ever before. While the deep red-orange of the clay oxidizes in a single firing, the black effects occur through further reduction firings, wood-burning, and Odundo’s specific, nearly alchemical process, honed through years of ceramic experimentation.

The astonishing symmetry of her work could be likened to the production of early Ferraris, whose elegant bodies were handmade so that “no two Ferraris are the same”—their streamlined perfection achieved only by hand. Gus Casely-Hayford OBE writes: “She creates work of such completeness that it gives the uncanny impression of being born and not made. In a single line or shape, dialectical oppositions might be imploded in her hands. Her pots’ small bulges, ripe with possibility, heavy with hunger, sublimate death into life and pain into beauty.”

Learn more about Odundo in Cfile.

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Ann Agee’s Brilliance Shines In Madonnas and Hand Warmers

NEW YORK– P.P.O.W presented Madonnas and Hand Warmers, Ann Agee’s third solo exhibition with the gallery (June 18 – July 23, 2021), showcasing the latest wares from the “Agee Manufacturing Company”, the fictitious enterprise that has motivated Agee’s three-decade career in ceramics. This tour de force exhibition comprises more than one hundred unique works.  

Agee’s practice has focused on cultural appropriation and exchange, and the range of women’s lived experiences. The work is inspired by late-17th and early-18th century Italian folk salt cellars in the collection of the Davanzati Palace in Florence. Part one, Madonnas of the Girl Child, is made from a variety of clays, formed with different techniques, modeled in myriad sizes, glazed in numerous patterns, and fired in multiple kilns and at various temperatures, these sculptures realistically or abstractly engage motifs of the divine infant. Whether being breastfed, cradled, or corralled, these girls are held up by their mothers and endowed with aptitude and virtue, regardless of their appearance. Part two, Hand Warmers, began in 2016, Also inspired by Italian folk pottery, these vessels reference footwear and were historically meant to be filled with hot water and clasped to warm one’s hands.

Lin Wang’s 20,000 Plate Installation at Kunsthall Grenland.

PORSGRUNN, NORWAY–More than twenty thousand handmade porcelain pieces contained within Norway-based, Chinese-born artist Lin Wang’s laborious installation Exotic Dreams and Poetic Misunderstandings – The Silk Roads (April 5 – May 26, 2019) at Kunsthall Grenland explore a wide range of cobalt blue tones, as much a shimmering river as it is a road.

Exotic Dreams refers to how Wang as a youngster was told myths about the North, and how she later moved to Norway and was confronted with a different reality entirely, while seeing her country of birth anew from a distance. Exoticism is a result of our perception of difference, or ‘otherness’. It is found in all corners of the world, generated through the continual process of constructing internal narratives while imagining, relating to and interpreting other cultures. Through her exhibitions and performances, Wang consistently reminds us that the cultures we create and the beliefs we project on others exist in a continual back and forth negotiation. Using the examples of China and Norway to underscore this dynamic, she expertly uses her craft to bridge cultures and create dynamic conversations.

This is Wang’s largest exhibition to date. In preparing it, Wang worked from both her studio in Jingdezhen, China and her temporary work space in Porsgrunn, creating works that formally unite a variety of clays, glazes, and other materials, such as gold, that originate from regions along the historic Maritime Silk Road.

Matt Nolen Making Art On the Seam

LONG ISLAND CITY–Matt Nolen’s exhibition, The Space Between, at Sculpture Space NYC (March 5- April 10, 2021) has its genesis in the summer of 2019 during a visiting artist residency at the Bezalel Art Academy in Jerusalem, Israel. He lived in a neighborhood “on the seam” between Jewish and Palestinian quarters and his daily observations resulted in venturing into “this psychologically charged transitional space that had me wondering about the porosity of borders and split forms that are more connected than they might appear”.

“For many years I made ceramic figures whose narratives occupied liminal spaces- life lived in the margins of great transition.  A cancer diagnosis in 2012 thrust me into my own liminal space as I struggled to cope with issues around mental, emotional and physical wellness and mortality.  Eventually I began to explore this space through the abstraction, ambiguity and hybridity of porcelain vessels.  The notion of endlessly splitting cells had me wondering about the new spaces that are created as a form splits apart vs. the apparent solidity, weight and mass of the tumors that evolve from cells dividing. The works in “The Space Between” have allowed me to investigate the relationship of the micro landscape of my body to the macro of the external world’s social and political environment.  Garniture sets, bookends, and ink blots are the vehicles allowing me to explore splitting, conjoining, seams and borders, collapse, failure and ultimately-regeneration”.

Nicki Green’s “Frankensteined” Kohler Products Show in China Town.

SAN FRANCISCO–Et al. etc. presented the work of artist Nicki Green in a solo exhibition of sculptures, Splitting/Unifying, (September 13 – October 26, 2019) made while in residence at the John Michael Kohler Art Center in Kohler, WI during the winter of 2019. We missed covering this show then but given its relevance, here it is now. These large ceramic and mixed media objects straddle the line between functional and ornamental and depict a density of surface information spanning Green’s interests of queer and trans history, mycology as a stand-in for queerness, Jewish mythology and alchemical practice. As she writes:

Lately, I’ve been really fascinated by ritual objects and particularly various water rituals, so a lot of what I was investigating at Kohler was washing rituals and appliances built for cleansing. While I was there, I kept thinking about white glaze as this striving towards purity. I was reading “Queering Bathrooms” by Sheila Cavenaugh who discusses white glaze showing grime as this analogy to queerness, the glaze is like straightness and normativity, this yearning for order, cleanliness and uniformity, but in its’ quest, reveals it’s innate inability to be totally any one thing; clean, tidy, straight, normal, etc.

While making these pieces, I thought of them as Frankensteined Kohler product; I used mostly waste materials (like literally digging through the “cull” or waste bins for wet, failed product to cut up and reassemble) to make washing/ablution ritual objects that affirm the queer body rather than attempt to exclude, organize, label, make visible in the way these bathroom appliances so often do. I considered what it means for objects to fail, my queer self in that space (queer, as in how I stuck out in the factory as trans, from out of town, Jewish, etc.) was already, in a sense, failure, so what happens if I let the objects I was making fail as well? This letting go of perfection, uniformity, normativity opened up an expansiveness not normally possible in a production factory setting.

John Roloff’s Metaphorical and Metaphysical Voyages Through Deep Time

SAN FRANCISCO—An important exhibition Cfile missed in 2019 was John Roloff: The Sea Within the Land 1980–2019 Selected Kiln Documentation & Photographic Installations/Recent Ceramic Ships, presented by Anglim Gilbert Gallery (May 4 – June 1, 2019) that surveyed Roloff’s profound decades-long investigation of geologic time, sites, and other natural phenomena.

Utilizing a cross-disciplinary approach to ceramics and performance, his work incorporates the earth and life sciences with architectural and historical elements. In the late 1960s, as a student at UC Davis, Roloff studied with California Funk artists Robert Arneson and William T. Wiley, as well as renowned geologist Eldridge Moores. This combination of radical experimentation in clay and emerging scientific discoveries in plate tectonics became the basis for Roloff’s long-term studies of the self, land, and sea.

The Sea Within the Land, in particular, incorporates a view of the landscape where, in the context of geologic time, the land and sea are mutable, interdependent forces. The processes of erosion and deposition are cyclical inversions of each other, a continuum of land and sea interaction through which new land is constantly being formed. In this fundamental way, land and seascapes are iterative –– each site containing ancestral material from past versions of itself. The image, form, and structure of ships, are also a significant motif in Roloff’s practice. Solitary and ghost-like, his ships refer to metaphorical and metaphysical voyages through deep time. The kiln projects and photographic works are sculptural extensions, often at architectural scale, of his research into site and transformation.

Adriana Varejão Travels Ceramic History Without Touching Clay

My work is always in the territory of hybridity—Adriana Varejão

NEW YORK–Gagosian is pleased to present Talavera, (May 9–June 26, 2021), new paintings and sculptures by Adriana Varejão. They are all about ceramics yet never use clay itself. Even her tile works use other materials to mimic their ceramic origins. The gallery points out that Varejão’s rich and diverse artistic oeuvre embodies the mythic pluralism of Brazilian identity and the fraught social, cultural, and aesthetic interactions that engendered it. Living and working in Rio de Janeiro, she draws upon the potent visual legacy of colonial histories and transnational exchange.

In the late 1980s, Varejão began researching azulejos, the glazed terra-cotta tiles of Arab origin that have been the most widely used form of decoration in Portuguese art since the Middle Ages and that were brought to Brazil through colonization and trade. From this, she developed her unique and ever-evolving series of “tile” paintings, made by covering a square canvas with a thick layer of plaster and allowing it to gradually dry to produce a surface with deep fissures resembling ancient crackled porcelain—or geological time itself.

Varejão’s most recent tile paintings explore the culture of Talavera poblana, the Mexican ceramic tradition originating in Spain that, like the azulejo, draws on diverse sources—in this case, indigenous, Hispanic, Italian, and Chinese. A photograph of a wall of Talavera tiles taken by Varejão in Mexico in the mid-1990s formed the basis for the painting Parede Mexicana (1999); twenty years later, this painting has become the indexical reference for an entire new series where the key motifs of individual tiles are adapted and enlarged to seventy-inch square canvases.

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If you are lucky enough to see Bend, Bubble and Shine in person, be ready to check your assumptions about how each artist approaches the construction and finishing of their work. Just know that trying to enter the mindset of a Danish ceramist is a fool’s errand. There are too many failed studio experiments, too many late-night conversations with other artists, too many artist-led exhibitions, journals, and collectives to make what you’re looking at a straightforward manifestation of surface and form. Even the most casual viewer will be swept up in the diversity of materials and approaches—and this is a direct effect of the artistic ferment caused by the hothouse environment that is contemporary Danish Ceramics.

For those of you stuck at home and forced to “touch from a distance,” know that Danish ceramists have your back. Even before the COVID–19 pandemic, Copenhagen Ceramics curated a 2019 exhibition at Denmark’s CLAY Museum of Ceramic Art entitled Ceramic Momentum – Staging the Object that took social media and the relationship between contemporary ceramics, social media, and digital screens into account.

In the exhibition’s increasingly relevant essay, The Rise of the Hyper Pot, Glenn Adamson muses about the reciprocal relationship between Instagram and ceramics, a sort of Botany of Desire feedback loop that has seen a rise in ceramists steering their work into Unicorn Frappucino territory with colors and surfaces meant to capture eyeballs. Ultimately, Adamson reassures us that Hyper Pots, with their drips, colors, and screen-friendly forms still function in the same way ceramics were always meant to “exert friction in the flow of life, like a rudder in a swift current.” With their twin tendencies to both embrace their forbears in an intergenerational web, as well as the impulse to thoughtfully rebel against them, one can be assured that contemporary Danish ceramics will remain a vibrant node in a global network.

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For an object to invite copying, it must first achieve some level of cultural cachet. It’s copies can paradoxically reveal the multifaceted and often troubling ways that this type of value is constructed. In taking up these objects, Beier nudges us into reckoning with our relationship to the tropes that cause us to associate things with power, security, prestige or happiness. Perhaps more unsettlingly, this mental audit can cause these associations to reverse themselves.

For her fourth exhibition at Croy Nielsen, installed on the gallery’s parquet flooring, the antique china doesn’t seem out of place in this formerly domestic space. Each hand-painted plate or vessel belongs to a series called Empire that was produced by Royal Copenhagen. Porcelain ceramics imported from China became coveted status symbols in Europe as early as the 14^th century. They were quickly and widely copied, yet European craftspeople couldn’t match the quality of Chinese exports for another nearly 400 years.

Hung on the surrounding walls are portraits of one of the gallery’s founders – Oliver Croy. Painted by Beier in a style that telegraphs how earnestly the artist took her charge of portraying her gallerist, they are good likenesses. If you want to check for yourself, just have a peek into the offices and see the original in the flesh.

By placing things into an uneasy state of cohabitation, I feel like Beier causes them to become more honestly themselves – as if an exhibition could also be group therapy for wayward commodities. Whether this is the case for the art dealer surrounded by paintings of himself is harder to say, but the short circuiting of the dynamic between a gallerist and the works they exhibit reveals something interesting about the machinations of art.

Rather than exempting herself, Beier instead draws a fascinating and humanizing line between her paintings and the objects she appropriates. In doing so, the subjectivity of the knock-off is illustrated anew. Some deviations from the source might just be the predilections of those who created the reproduction shining through. Just as a portrait painter can choose to focus on a few favored features to describe a subject, so can the handbag forger. That these choices are inevitably influenced by the power structures that enabled them is something that we are left to grapple with on our own.

Essay by Patrick Armstrong, Courtesy Croy Nielsen

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I adore American culture and I love going on road trips through this vast land, preferably on a motorcycle. American Journey is a roadmap of American cultural icons I enjoy and I could list off the top of my head. They run from hyperstars like Elvis and Walt Disney to forgotten heroes like Cliff Vaughs and Ben Hardy who built the motorcycles ridden by Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider.

When I was filming my US TV documentary series one of my favourite encounters was with a Manhattan colour consultant and one of her clients. When I referred to them as members of the liberal elite the client said he hated that term. I said, “yeah, now you know how it feels for your group to have a negative label.” The Sacred Beliefs of The Liberal Elite is covered in little phrases that perhaps mock the pieties of his tribe: “Original Ideas are the product of Capitalist Scum!”, “This pot is made using 67% ethically sourced ideas”, “Hipsters Unite against conformity”.’

‘Stable Genius is based on a seventeenth-century English slipware charger that I saw in a Milwaukee art museum. I adore the simple relaxed drawing on these early ceramics. The original also showed a lion with a ridiculous head of a leader, probably the king. When a reporter asked Donald Trump when he was first elected if he would be fazed by becoming President and boarding Air Force One he said no, “I am a very stable genius.” This European style of slipware was something that early settlers reproduced on American soil.

Vote Republican is also based on an early English press moulded slipware plate. A lot of these would have been produced around the time of the English Civil War and often depicted King Charles, sometimes up an oak tree, sometimes on horseback. The civil war raging in the USA at the moment is of course the culture war. On this plate we have Donald Trump on horseback, his hat balanced on his impossible hair surrounded by tweeting birds.

Crybully and Lolcow is again based on an early English press moulded plate showing two gents smoking and drinking in a coffee house. Crybully and Lolcow perhaps sound like characters in a Restoration comedy but they are two very modern terms I gleaned from a rather brilliant YouTube channel called ContraPoints. Crybully is an elegant way of putting the psychotherapeutic phenomenon of “persecuting from a victim standpoint” someone who thinks because they have had something unfortunate happen to them it gives them a free pass to be awful to other people. A Lolcow is someone on social media who is unwittingly hilarious and other users will provoke and tease the Lolcow into reacting in an unconsciously stupid, angry and unintentionally funny way: they milk them for laughs, hence Lolcow.’

‘Aspects of My Sexuality and Gender Dressed Up as Colonial Settlers shows Claire and Alan Measles in the style of early American folk art, togged out in nineteenth-century European clothes arriving in the “New World” to find a piece of land and start a new life. Problematic!

In fact there are a lot of problematic elements to this innocent seeming work if you want to look for them. Ever since my first visit to the USA in the 1980s I have been aware that it is a land prone to extremes. Extremes of natural beauty and strip mall crassness, right-wing fanaticism and left-wing dogma, alcoholic or teetotal, religious conservatism or hedonistic abandon, the cutting edge and the deepest traditions, rural isolation and cities that never sleep. The Internet seems to have turbocharged this polarisation. Sanity, I feel, lies in the middle ground. I ride my bike down the middle, between the ditches of rigidity and chaos.’ 

The post Feature | Grayson Perry in America appeared first on CFile - Contemporary Ceramic Art + Design.

These quartet of essays cover some key works from the 20^th century but are by no means a full retrospective. That requires a book length treatise. Further, these Conversations only deal with his sculpture and his lively painting career is only touched on when it relates to the 3D.

The informality of illustration, more scrapbook than coffee table, is deliberate because of the range of image quality in the artist’s archives and to be more the roughness of a research document than a finished print project. This has allowed more freedom in chasing the narrative. Paragraphs in italics are from email conversations between myself and Astbury over a period of over four months.

My interest is not entirely objective. I am a fan. In full disclosure: Astbury, and his wife Lesley (to whom this series of posts is fondly dedicated), were among the first friends my ex-wife Lynne Wagner and I made after our move from Johannesburg to London in 1974. I had arrived to invent a career. There were no flesh and blood models for me to follow as a dedicated historian and critic of modern and contemporary ceramics. Astbury’s work and his intellectual acuity and love of debate, was an early inspiration. We have remained friends ever since if sporadically in touch.

I have watched his career ebb and flow, curated an exhibition of his work (solo exhibition Everson Museum 1979) written often of his art in my books (my partner Mark Del Vecchio has done the same) and we have a brace of major pieces by him in our collection at the Museum of Fine Arts-Houston. But I have never represented him which allows me greater freedom to opine.

Click and you can access part 2, 3 and 4.

Let’s begin by imagining a query from an imaginary colleague, a serious arts writer but with little knowledge of ceramics. He asks for the name of the most important early British figure in the growth of Postmodern sculptural ceramics outside the umbrella of the vessel. My answer? Paul Astbury.

The next question is, “where do I find information on the artist; book, survey exhibitions, a retrospective publication?” In truth, aside from one intriguing catalog, Document, published in 1995, there is nothing major. Certainly, there is no retrospective. To younger makers his name rings no bell. The scholarly apparatus of ceramics has totally failed Astbury, and for that matter, the field itself. Nonetheless, he remains a figure of singular importance.

This void was exacerbated by two factors. One is that Astbury never found dealers to support his journey. Where would the artists of Marsden Woo (and its earlier incarnations) be today without this sturdy, dependable, commercial force on their side for decades? Astbury has, throughout his career, lacked a broker. This underlines the central role, often formative, that commercial representation plays in establishing legacy for an artist.

The second factor is that he is a sculptor. By sculptor I specifically and narrowly mean an artist working outside the orbit of the vessel, or more plainly, pottery. The latter covers most of the stars of British ceramic art back in the previous century and even today: Allison Britton, Carol McNicol, Martin Smith, Julian Stair, Grayson Perry, Edmund de Waal, Magdalena Odundo et al. Pot makers all. In British ceramics in the last quarter of the of the 20^th century, his disinterest in pottery made him an outlier.

Yes, Astbury did make pots in his undergraduate years. He was in Stoke, how could he not. Throwing did not captivate Astbury at all. And while he sporadically made pottery forms early on, this genre did not lock in. His vessels were mostly slabbuilt, often big, crude, and rudimentary like farm vessels, basins and large angular pitchers, more the forms of metal than clay with lids that suggested narrative. But mostly more sculptor than potter. Little sign of love for the pot.

His approach revealed a fully formed Postmodernist. A plate and a handled pot reveal this. At fifteen he combined lithographic decals with a printed mountain, his defining razor-sharp ironic edge emerging early.

Indeed, this piece, Reclining Vessel (1964), one of his earlier ceramics, shows little reverence for pottery, his droll visual humor presenting more of a grotesquery, a pancake more than a pot. 

There is also a period of slipcast vessels made shortly before he left for London that excite. They are nominally pots, however, explosions of shape, line and energy, anchored by volume but not beholden to the vessel.

Tanya Harrod writing in the Spectator says of Astbury that he has “operated these long years as a sculptor but is categorized as a ceramicist…He deserves a big cheer for bravery in defiance of categories”.

Thus, when it came to audience and a place in the ceramic medium, he fell between two stalls; the pot-oriented ceramic community did not get what he did, it was too removed from the decorative arts, and the sculpture wing of the fine arts establishment did not recognize ceramics as a valid medium. He had no home.

Astbury was born in 1945 and raised in Oakhanger, Cheshire, a bucolic gem, a cluster of buildings rather than a village, a mere fourteen miles distant from the federation of six pottery towns: Burslem, Fenton, Hanley, Longton, Stoke-on-Trent and Tunstall.  But there was no “Stoke” factor in the Astbury’s daily lives. Rarely visited, it might as well have been in another country.

[Oakhanger] has no shops, no pub, just one Victorian Chapel, a couple of farms, three terraced houses and at that time four bungalows and a wood institute. Real sinister backwoods stuff of the kind David Lynch would die for. I lived in the end one called ‘Affinity’ nearest the chapel. I spent time combing ploughed fields for dinosaur fossils, ancient pottery and Roman treasure. I found a few fossils and bits of farm pottery but never any treasure. Nonetheless, Great days!

Then again, the ceramics scholar might presume that his material choice had to do with family names. John Astbury is one of the great potters of the late 17^th century Wedgwood era.

Yes, I did know of John Astbury the potter in my teens, his name was big in the Potteries. ‘Astbury Ware’ as such, filled cabinets in Hanley Museum. But no, not an influence.”

Then came Fradley, Paul’s mother’s maiden name. Was this a possible clue? Thomas Fradley was a drinking buddy of Josiah Wedgwood, a master of marbled slip, and briefly ran a pottery. It was rumored that there were familial links but ultimately neither of the potters inspired Astbury.

The key issue for Astbury growing up was his mother’s amateur pursuit of art. Mrs. Astbury had worked for a well-to-do woman as her maid and companion before the war. This gave her interests and values not usually found in what was essentially a working-class family. Mr. Astbury had owned a coal transport business before the war but afterwards worked as a laborer for British Rail.

When her employer died Mrs. Astbury inherited a sum of money that allowed her not to have to work as well as providing inherited quality furnishings. Together with a house they owned, this gave the illusion of being mildly well off when in fact money was always short, worsened by Mr. Astbury’s gambling habit.

On my mother’s side of the family there is a history of bargees and boat building at Chester, making barges for the canals and painting and decorating of the barges themselves. My mother’s uncle Tom did this as a living, wonderful decorative motifs of castles and roses.

My mother began my drawing while I was still in my highchair. Placing a matchbox and coin into my small hands, she showed me how to draw around them to create basic images of cars, tractors and motorcycles. I was very keen to learn and by the time I entered school was able to impress all teachers with my range of drawing skills. Unfortunately, that’s all I could do and the rest, my required CGE’s, was a hard slog.

In 1963, at the tender age of 15. he was admitted to the Burslem College of Art School for a pre-diploma course leading to Art and Design (Dip. A D) majoring in drawing and painting. That might have been his future but for a eureka moment.

By chance one lunch hour I noticed Colin Saunders a young tutor, working in a room I had never been in before. Curious, I entered to see what he was doing. He had a plaster mold in front of him and from this he was trying to extract something. The ‘something’ turned out to be a piece of slip-cast clay. I was familiar with wheel-thrown pottery but not this. The clay image turned out to be a twig he had molded and cast to make an unusual cup handle. I thought, ‘instant metamorphosis’!!

I asked if he would allow me to use and experiment with clay in the same way. He agreed I could work in the room with him every lunch time. I made many clay pieces during this period and flabbergasted myself and him also by the images produced, such as ‘Octopus’.

Structures like ‘Octopus’ were something new in ceramics, well, in Burslem at least, and building it involved balloons, never associated with ceramics either, that gave it support while the minor miracle dried and shrank as the balloons withered relative to the clay. How could such delicacy survive a firing without falling to pieces? Well, it survived two firings, a bisque and another for the glaze and this was all thanks to quality engineering.

From the moment Astbury entered school, he was eager at his young age of fifteen, to yank Modernism’s chains. Later works such as Flat World (1968) and The New World (1968) sent the same message.

He found a loyal champion in the school principal, Reginald Marlow, who had a ceramics background. He was a ceramics graduate at the Royal College of Art, London, under Professor William Staite Murray, and a competent potter.

For Marlow, Astbury was a perfect student to show off the school (note the image below with Marlow and Lord Snowden); working-class, handsome, charismatic, smart, eloquent, progressive, edgy, questioning and forceful.

In 1965 Astbury was invited to join the BA program in Stoke-On-Trent by the Head of Fine Art, Colin Melbourne.

I had intended doing a B.A. Fine Art in Painting but quickly realized clay had more to offer though I continued with painting as well which proved useful. For one thing it was wide open for the fine artist to explore and challenge the status quo. Melbourne also saw the opportunity and I was his point man. 

There was no money, local authorities would not pay further fees. As fate would have it, there was a painting competition in the college, called ‘Nocturn’, and I won. ‘The British Pottery Manufacturers Federation Award’ provided my tuition fees for the whole year ahead plus all expenses and materials.

They were great days in many ways, hard, heady and slightly on the wild side but first and foremost always aimed towards the practice of art.

His next stop (and the next conversation) is in 1969 at the Royal College of Art, London.

The post FEATURE | Paul Astbury: Four Conversations in Lieu of a Retrospective. Part 1 1963-1969. appeared first on CFile - Contemporary Ceramic Art + Design.

The quartet of essays cover some key works from the 20^th century but are by no means a full retrospective. That requires a book length treatise. Further, these Conversations only deal with his sculpture, and his lively painting career is only touched on when it relates to the 3D.

The informality of illustration, more scrapbook than coffee table, is deliberate because of the wide range of image quality in the artist ‘s archives, more the edge of a research document. This has allowed more freedom in chasing the narrative. Paragraphs in italics are from email conversations between myself and Astbury over a period of four months. Click to access parts 1, 3 and 4.

Even though Astbury was ambitious and had become a star student in Stoke-on-Trent, he never thought that he would be short-listed for acceptance into the Royal College of Art. When the call came, he was shocked. Little prepared him for the interview itself.

I sat at a table in an office with Queensberry, Dicky Chopping, Sam Herman, Eduardo Paolozzi, Hans Coper, Joe Shipley, and Peter O’Malley. There were objects arranged on the table and Q asked if I liked any. I pointed to three similar pots. Why those? I replied they reminded me of flying saucers.

Everyone was very amused. They were Hans Coper pots. Hans took it well.  Q pointed to a heavy thick-walled ceramic object and again asked what I thought of it. I replied, not much, it looked clumsy. Q was tickled pink. He was having a field day. It turned out to be a pot by Hamada! 

Two weeks later Astbury returned for a second interview. Queensberry was clearly keen on having Astbury admitted. But there was an issue. Dicky Chopping thought that Astbury wasn’t serious enough about the plant drawing classes.  Plant drawing classes???

In those days the Department of Ceramics was still geared for industry. Indeed, it was called the Department of Industrial Ceramics. Plant drawing was intended to inspire pattern and decoration for industrially made ceramics. The drawing issue was resolved and Astbury was admitted.

Astbury arrived just as Queensberry was beginning to morph the department into an art-based facility that would revolutionize British contemporary ceramics, launching what was generically titled the ‘New Ceramics’, essentially Postmodernism, and Astbury was fortunate to be in the movement’s first wave.

But it was not an easy fit.

The first year was difficult in a new working environment. I did not have enough space, only a desk. It was frustrating and things like scrap yards and industrial tips in the landscape, that had once visually inspired me, weren’t there. I felt lost and at this point nearly left the course. The situation carried on for some time until I started making objects reminiscent of rocky landscapes. A graphics student said they reminded her of Iceland where she had lived and she lent me a fabulous book of photographs illustrating the volcanic nature of her country. I was enthused. 

The space issue was solved when Geoff Swindell, a potter and Astbury’s longtime friend from Stoke, a year ahead of him at the RCA, offered to share the studio he had rented and occupied with Mary Keepax.

In the second year I felt much happier and started using press-moulding techniques and discovered ways of producing fragmenting surfaces to the clay that gave the impression of aging. Press-molding provided a quicker method of producing clay shapes and structures to develop themes based on obsolescence, fragmenting machines, organic spaceships and other much larger works such as ‘Dog with Mechanical Bone’, and ‘Envelope’.  

This was further enhanced when Geoff introduced me to a sandblasting machine in the glass dept. The fine sand, fired at the glaze took the shine off, ate into the surface making it less commercial and much harder to identify as glaze.

In the final year 1971, Peter Aldridge (glass artist) joined me in the studio. Geoff Swindell had already graduated the year before along with Mary Keepax and Elizabeth Fritch. So, for the final year Pete and I had the studio to ourselves. I was asked to exhibit work at Bradford Museum and Art Gallery. I sent eleven pieces and sold four. Next, I received a commission from Liberty in Regent Street, brokered by Queensberry, to make a special sculpture for their Ceramic and Glass Department’s opening.

The RCA was a locus, a place where with Queensberry’s constant prodding, things happened for its students.

By now science fiction had taken over Astbury’s art. This produced a bond with Paolozzi who was also focused on this subject. Paolozzi was a leading British sculptor and one of the founders of the Pop Art movement. His presence in the ceramics department, one of Queensberry’s smartest moves, gave his department a unique link to mainstream fine art.

Paolozzi was a great character and also very enthusiastic about my work and my science fiction focus, heaping gifts on me from toys to magazines, visits to his studio in South Kensington and his home in Norfolk.

This writer first met Astbury with Paolozzi at the Royal College in 1974 when the two artists were collaborating on an exhibition (eventually shelved), Science Fiction in Art, for the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London.

Most of all I enjoyed my chats with Hans Coper. He would come into the studio and I would open the old wooden wardrobe, which contained my small works. He would peer in and give his undivided attention and much valued opinion. On one occasion he mentioned he had had ambitions to be a sculptor too. He loved Cycladic sculpture, an influence that shows in his work.

He responded well always to my work and gave me much support, advising always against teaching. He told me one day that when he was younger returning from Canada after WWII, he had won a residency at Digswell House in Hertfordshire, where he and other young artists were provided with studios to make sculpture. He admitted he failed at sculpture and ended up making clay bricks, which consequently lined the edges of a rough path he made from his living space to his workshop. They were still there when I visited in the mid-seventies. I doubt many people know this. I could have been the first person to own a genuine Hans Coper brick.  

So yes, I was into sci-fi, making clay organic machines, spaceships etc. I also began the series called ‘Synthetic Strata’, rocks split open to reveal fossilized technology, illustrating clay as a by-product of rock and turned back into rock via high temperatures in the kiln.

The work posited Astbury in time travel. He took high-tech components and set them in rocks like fossils, simultaneously part of the present, past and future. As Mark Del Vecchio wrote in Postmodern Ceramics, “Astbury’s work anticipated the post-industrial climate in which we now live. Instead of seeing industry as the progressive future, he projected it backwards into the paleontological past”.

The thing to remember is that it was all to do with impermanence, everything deteriorating and changing and altering values. So yes, there’s a connection between these series but also a difference, particularly in meaning.

‘Fragmentation’ is the falling apart and instability of matter, whereas ‘Synthetic Strata’ is a false alien world of manufactured rocks lying amongst natural ones predating dinosaurs and animal fossils. It puts the future back into the past suggesting re-cycling a whole world programme. I think my work is always involved with this and I don’t mind if you put them together under the one heading, Fossils, so long as distinctions are clearly made.

Certain elements link the series. One is that they all mix organic and technology in ways that range from the profound to the comical. No. 10 Space Form, one of the most evolved of the works in terms of its svelte, elegant process with its soft sandblasted surface, feels like a marine artifact, maybe robotic cuttlefish bone. Or a space vessel.

In all the works the words “alien”, “nature”, “technology (low and high)”, “space”, “rock”, “time” rattle around like divining bones being shaken by a medicine man before being thrown to the ground to tell the future. How they fall, what context they find themselves in, what metaphors they evoke, all change the viewer’s dialogue from work to work.

The last of this decade’s work, represented here by Dual Purpose and Broken Ground, are the most radical. Perhaps they acknowledge and reject a growing preciousness in the art. Either way they mark a shift from refined to raw. The works are broken and poorly reassembled with fragments missing, tape and wood holding parts together and defaced with small-scale penned graffiti. What happens with these works is a shift from conceptual view decay to experiential.

They are the closing coda for a decade-long journey that produced one of the most significant, integrated bodies of ceramic art of the 1980’s. With a new decade the work changes direction and style, recasting Astbury in the 1990’s in the role of a particle scientist and tailor.

The post FEATURE | Paul Astbury: Four Conversations in Lieu of a Retrospective. Part 2 1969-1979. appeared first on CFile - Contemporary Ceramic Art + Design.

In the late 1970’s Paul Astbury’s focus changed from science fiction to particle physics. He was among the first artists to explore a conceptual fascination with this technology and ever since it has remained a part of his creative practice, his way of thinking, presenting, all the way through to drawing a line.

I was interested in ‘particle accelerator machines’ used electromagnetic fields to whip particles around at great speed, contain them into beams and collide them into one another inside bubble chambers forcing particles to leave tracks and traces of themselves.

The canvas of the bubble-chamber began to appear in his work and took literal form, essentially importing bubble packaging as a kind of porthole (we see this used most directly in his jackets). It was inspired by the way particle physics created “the raw simple marks, expressive fundamental signatures of life. Nature was drawing itself, something we had never seen or perceived in daily life. It seemed to me ‘reality’ was somehow arranged upon an already existing platform or matrix”.   

He began fixing pieces of fired clay onto ready-mades, the first being, two lengths of wood, Grown Matrix, 1980, using clay and other materials to illustrate a meeting point between different energies, values, suggesting probabilities of what might have or might not have been. Box (1980), a cardboard box dealt with this in the same way, covered in clay pieces along with paint, sellotape.

Other works followed using tables, chairs, clothing, trees and car tires, etc., things that are involved with our normal daily lives. It was a new way of giving clay “form” other than modelling it and this particular process provided a given structure, chair, table, etc, on which clay could be fixed and exist in space at certain already measured coordinates, maintaining individual position and status. Just as particles carry energy/information, the clay pieces were imbued with marks, colored smears of araldite and burnt oil stains according to my demands. 

I realized I was resurrecting each ready-made with new life but also suggesting burial under layers of clay. It was also a tailored encasement of the object, a sarcophagus, a concealed seed. The object’s actual physical reality being retained by this change, a metamorphosis of values allowing it to become something else.

It suggests power and presence of particles rebuilding this world to retain reality of each thing within it. The mind races over such combinations of imagery and those chosen materials in a way that affects perceptions of a structured world, which, to quote Heisenberg’s ‘Tissue of Events’, ‘…connections of different kinds alternate or overlap or combine and thereby determine the texture of the whole’, and to this end maintain as one. 

The work Vanished World, 1985, speaks loudest of his particle exploration. It is constructed of multiple collisions, breaks, restarts followed by more breaks taking a brittle material and shattering it again and again. The same anarchic energy and poetic violence can be found in the drawing Drawing/Notebook, 1985.

At times Astbury gives into almost comic moments, perhaps to relieve the intensity of this thesis. His layering of art/science metaphors as with Monitor Generating Pitcher or TV Dish (1984), which takes on the ceramic world and the sanctity of the vessel, substituting it with the casing that holds a television tube in place. This cheeky transposition of an industrial cradle, defined by its function to contain, into a pot of importance and complexity, upsets pottery conventions and aesthetics from William Morris to Bernard Leach and to an extent, even those of today.

Astbury became drawn to clothing, an on-again, off-again relationship to volume, noting that once we subtract the wearer, garments deflate and become two dimensional. But he also sees clothing as armor, a device to protect or deflect fear.

I began the series of clothing in the mid-eighties with ‘Prisoners Suit’ 1984, representing various concerns, particularly burial. Emmanuel Cooper commented, (Craft Magazine, issue 105 July/Aug 1990) about its appearance of ‘His ‘Prisoner’s Suit’ on the ‘Space and Form’ exhibition, Rufford Park Gallery, ‘made up of neatly cut clay pieces screwed on top of, all but obscuring a pair of trousers and a jacket on a wooden silhouette. For me it is a sinister, intriguing, dialogue on the defining power of convention’. 

We hide, bury, trap and protect ourselves inside layers of clothing. Hands and gloves similarly intrigue me, from early mankind daubing cave walls with palms covered in reds ochres or charcoal leaving a signature of personal self. Gloves similarly are indicative of efforts to protect and preserve natural skin from harm or used to enhance as fashion accessories.

The jackets go beyond clay, some are covered with painted images, others in steel and felt. Most are of mixed media but clay is never far away because the many things it represents cannot be ignored. Clothing describes the human figure an echo of activity, presence, stature, office, hopes and fears.

They can be combined with a mass of other things, Between Heaven and Hell, 2010-2019, is a suspended leather suit which supports and uses images made of raw clay on the back of the suit, and fired clay images on the front. These are contained inside a variety of plastic blister packs. I sense the amulet, lucky charms here, representations of the psychological human condition of all hopes and destinies.

For Astbury clothing carries a personal footnote. As a child he dressed better than his family’s financial station would have allowed because his mother was so adept at making their clothes. Though he points out that if one looked closer one would have noticed that the “pants were often patched and the socks were darned.”

Right there as a young child he was seeing clothing as camouflage to alter and improve status. Also, his mother was so supportive of him attending art school, in part, because she had wanted to study to be a tailor but never had the opportunity. While it may be a romantic observation, she left with him part of that unrequited desire, the garment as identity, bespoke but not Saville Row, and since 1980 it has been a continuing obsession.

The post FEATURE | Paul Astbury: Four Conversations in Lieu of a Retrospective. Part 3 1980-1989 appeared first on CFile - Contemporary Ceramic Art + Design.

In the past decade the most popular ‘new’ medium internationally for sculptors has been the ancient tradition of working with unfired clay as the finished product. Its Italian title is terracruda (raw earth) vs. terracotta (cooked earth). The list of artists from the top contemporary canon artists who work in unfired clay is impressive; Adrian Villar Rojas, Miquel Barcello, Erwin Wurm, Urs Fischer, Cassils, Anna Maria Maiolino. Clay serves different muses. Some works are simply allowed to submit to process, to crumble and erode as soon as they begin to dry, becoming what terracruda maestro, Rojas, calls “instant ruin”. Others use clay in a performance art context. Some works are given a long life due to material transfer, the miraculous fidelity of current bronze casting technology, with patinas that mimic dried or damp clay to eye-deceiving perfection. Marc Wanders is a case in point.

This leads back to Paul Astbury’s last major body of work in the 20^th century. By 1993, again ahead of the curve, he was working with unfired clay. It was not the first time. His use of unfired clay dates back to the Stoke-on-Trent student years as we see with his 1967 work, Container of Another World, made from unfired clay, glass and smoke.

In 1994 this interest earned him a place on the prescient international touring show, The Raw and the Cooked, one of the decades most important exhibitions, curated by Martina Margetts and Alison Britton.

This aspect of his work was show twice by Diorama Gallery, first as Background in 1995, in handsome cold-white vitrines, in an installation that suggested an arcade of super-minimalist (and agonizingly slow) video games. Five years later, in 1999, the exhibition was reprised under a new title, Pulse. It was accompanied by a publication Document, that not only dealt with the unfired works but with Astbury’s legacy to date.

As the artist states apropos this exhibition:

Like anything that suggests a fetal or embryonic condition there is a supernatural remoteness, an imposed distancing from our own perceived sense of existence. This distancing is an important part of the work as is the interplay between moisture and atmospheric conditions.

The clay images themselves are far from that state where they could be practically handled or used in any real sense. The clay forms remain preserved and isolated, framed within their vitrines suggesting a further extension to the physical and psychological space separating the nature of the image from the viewer’s preconceptions.

I was involved with thoughts of process, particularly industrial pottery held at its halfway stage, fresh from the molds, unfinished and unfired, plus the raw clay sculptures of animals of 10,000 years ago, discovered in caves in the Pyrenees, an immature unfinished state of being.

This was my chance to work differently, the familiar, namely conventional domestic objects made by the pottery industry, teapots, cups and saucers, vases and much-loved ornaments of animals in an extreme unfamiliar way, the raw clay state.  

In 2003 Astbury accepted an invitation from editor Emmanuel Cooper to write about his raw clay art in Ceramic Review. In his essay, “Other States” (Issue 200, March/April 2003) Astbury admits that, “wet clay makes me aware of a borrowed material, still uncommitted. In all these works, the material can be thrown back into the ground or reused in another piece.”

Laura Breen in her book, Ceramics and the Museum, 2019, writes that ‘Astbury began to explore the symbolic properties of wet clay and fired object in the early 1990s….Poised between raw clay and fired object, the works demonstrated that clay was just a medium, which might become something else as readily as a piece of ceramic.’

Laura Breen saw this work as evidence of Astbury’s fascination with the archaeological (or “future archeology’ as he saw it):

“[He] married the use of unfired clay as a symbol of the rise from the earth to the contradictory use of fired clay objects as something that can transcend death. Seemingly vulnerable in their unfired state, some of Astbury’s casts have defied the passage of time and endured for decades, whilst others have collapsed, bearing the marks of their existence. They thus serve as metaphors for the way in which even objects that are stored in cases and unused are reformed by the imperceptible contextual changes that surround them.’

Writer and critic John Houston noted that Astbury’s “artefacts are about artefacts’ and ‘If a single feeling dominates his work it is an imaginative fascination with the spirit that permeates technical advance. New needs, new faiths, new theories: some overtaken and fossilized by events, others merely faint images on a nebulous future.’

Emmanuel Cooper, editor of Ceramic Review, posited that Astbury’s sculptures, ‘offer a meditation on our understanding of creation, on the nature of its ever-changing cycle, and on the way civilizations develop and fall’.

Julia Davis, director of Diorama Gallery, saw the exhibition as a means to ‘by-pass the debate surrounding the boundaries between design and function, art and craft, use and context, replacing the hows for the whys; avoiding the concerns of method and control which have been overshadowed by the forces of time and nature.’

Document is the point at which the true analysis of Astbury’s oeuvre and contribution to postmodern ceramics should have begun in earnest but in fact is where it ended. No survey exhibitions. No retrospective. Hence the Four Conversations, hardly sufficient, but a start.

There were a few cameo appearances: his 2011 inclusion by Glenn Adamson in Postmodernism, Style and Subversion 1970 – 1990 at the Victoria and Albert Museum and in 2012, Shifting Paradigms in Contemporary Ceramics at the Museum of Fine Art-Houston where Prisoner’s Suite was one of the most admired works on this 250-object exhibition.

In closing, looking back on why Astbury has spent so much time on the margins we can actually pinpoint the moment when the split takes place between sculpture and the vessel in craft-based British ceramics. It comes in the mid-1970’s as Astbury notes:

Regrettably, the contemporary crafts scene and the category of ceramics did not understand the position I took and probably have never realized or acknowledged that I have always been a fine artist working with the medium of clay. Yet I was enlisted to bring up the craft medium to a higher plain of concept placing it nearer to fine art.

I think the crafts eventually took exception and tried to ignore the fact, little realizing that my approach would develop the field. Today, I think that attitude has lifted to some extent. In the early days (1973) I was approached by John Houston for the CAC (Crafts Advisory Committee, now Craft Council) who persuaded me to help develop ceramics.

It came about when a student of Astbury’s at the Horsey School of Art where he taught part-time told him how much she had admired his work on an exhibition The Craftsman’s Art at the Victoria and Albert Museum.

I went to the museum that following weekend and lo and behold two pieces of my work had been displayed without my permission. I saw red, could not believe their audacity and the following week rang the V&A to find out who was responsible for including my work in the show without my consent. I was given a name, John Houston who was part of the CAC. 

Astbury was already upset with the CAC having walked past their Craft Shop in Covent Gardens and noticed that they were using his work as display stands for jewelry in their front window.

I asked for the work to be instantly removed from the V&A as I did not wish to be included in such a show. A day later I was contacted by John Houston. He apologized profusely, could we meet, it was very important, the pieces had been submitted by the Craft Centre and he had presumed I knew all about it.

We met at the V&A and viewed the pieces still on display. He was very apologetic and begged me to leave the pieces in the show, insisting that my work was really required to lift the standard. I explained my work was not craft but fine art, that because it was made of ceramic it should not automatically become craft. Craft did not have copyright over a material. He understood my concerns but still insisted my work was essential for helping the general public understand that ceramics was developing and needed artists like myself.

I was flattered by these comments, he seemed to have good reason and it was certainly refreshing to hear that ceramics particularly was being viewed in this way by an authority set to redevelop this art form and allow artists like myself forge the way ahead and I was invited into a three-man show for the opening of the Waterloo Place Gallery owned by the C.A.C. 

The show was well received and my ceramic work was shown together with my paintings. The other two participants were Michael Rowe, jeweler and Faith Shannon, book binder. One of my paintings was chosen as the poster for the Public Underground. I had no idea until I came face to face with my own work at Hammersmith tube station. It was a very weird experience. CAC was not strong on communication.

There was talk of a traveling show called Ceramic Form to Europe and John asked if I could recommend other ceramic artists who I felt ought to be recognized and included. At that time not even the C.A.C. knew who was who. I put forward the names you see on the poster, Glenys, myself, Elizabeth Fritch, Jacqueline Poncelet, Jill Crowley, Geoff Swindell and Gordon Baldwin. We were to become the new elite in ceramics.

But as time went on, Astbury’s role as the poster boy of an art-craft hybridization diminished, new people took over, “my fine art role became unwanted and the new Craft Council did not see my work meeting their criteria. Unfortunately, and embarrassingly for the C.A.C., they had already acquired a large amount of my work for the collection”.

In fact, the Council has the largest and most significant collection of his 1970’s art of any institution (the Museum of Fine Art-Houston comes next). You can visit the Council’s excellent group by clicking here and typing Paul Astbury in the search box.

The critic and voice for the crafts, Peter Dormer, accused the Craft Council of having too many fine art pieces in the collection and argued for such works to be removed. Those whose work was too art-like were excluded and found themselves adrift. The CAC never acquired another work by Astbury. As mentioned earlier, the sculpture galleries were not yet ready to take on art made of clay and the fissure between artists and crafters widened leaving the former without a champion.

So, it is time for catch-up, devoting scholarly resources to those artists in ceramics whose role as artists, perversely lead them to be sidelined by the field. And it leaves us with a question; when will Paul Astbury get his retrospective?

As an artist Astbury’s career summed up his own quest for art-truth in his art in “Other States” when he wrote that “…the past, the present and the future create the perceived reality, carrying the work through each moment and in this aspect confronting, rather than obeying, what is expected.’ And confront he did. Royally.

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A Hub of Community and Culture

SPRINGVALE, AUSTRALIA–Lyons Architecture has completed a community center for the city of Springvale in Australia. It has created a vivid façade of colorful glazed bricks. The colors represent colors from various national flags that make up the current demographic of Springvale. A graphic provided by the architects shows just how effectively this goal has been achieved. It is located in the greater Dandenong City Council, the most culturally diverse community in Australia:

Springvale has a large Vietnamese population as well as residents from over 99 other birthplaces. the new community hub incorporates design elements that reflect its culturally diverse population—a symbol of hope, safety and beauty for more than 30,000 immigrants and refugees who entered Australia through the enterprise migrant hostel in Springvale. The new multi-purpose community hub offers a variety of learning, recreational and cultural facilities, including a state-of-the-art library, flexible community meeting spaces, a new customer service area and extensively landscaped green spaces and outdoor activity areas. additionally, a café provides a space to meet and relax, while the technology hall gives access to screens and spaces to work and connect. outdoor spaces encourage community engagement, with multi-use courts, playgrounds, extensively landscaped gardens, and an outdoor accessible bathroom.

Glass Bricks Provide Breathing Room for Hooba Headquarters

TEHERAN–The Hooba Design Group used bricks with glass inserts to create a ‘semi-transparent character’ for the headquarters of the brick manufacturer Kohan Ceram in Tehran employing a special type of brick, developed by Kohan Ceram factory, for the six-story facades. The architects explain:

A close cooperation between our office and the producer resulted in an innovative building block which combines brick and glass to create a singular module. The resulting brick, which has circular glass inserts, was used across the building’s facades where it creates geometric patterns broken up by narrow window slits.

Similar bricks with a round indentation, instead of the glass inserts, complete the exterior. Concertina window shutters in the same rust-colored hue as the brickwork and with matching circular cut-outs cover the building’s windows to create a unified look for the facade.

“This block acts as masonry, thermal isolation, as well as exterior and interior finishing at the same time,” he continued. “This brick enables natural light penetration to create a unique and pleasant interior environment.”

A Window to the River IJ

AMSTERDAM, NETHERLANDS–Pontsteiger (‘Ferrypier’) is a vast residential project in the Netherlands. The building is located at the end of a 200 metre dam that flows into the water of the river IJ. Arons en Gelauff Architecten describe the project:

The building consists of a six floor low-rise block that wraps around a plaza on the waterfront. Two slender 60 metre high towers at the open end of this block frame the river view. The towers carry a bridge spanning 48 metres rising to a height of 90 metres. The building is elevated 7 metres and set upon a base of four pavilions. The pavilions accommodate lobbies, restaurants, bars and cafes. A marina is located at the westside. The public space on ground level provides access to the water and creates views across the river in every direction. Despite its scale, the building’s elevated volume creates an astonishing light-footed presence on site and a constantly changing appearance from every part of the city. On the facades of Pontsteiger a playful grid of marble-white concrete is set with artisan glazed bricks. The chameleonic tones of green and bronze create a façade that changes with the light and time of day, just like the surface of the water surrounding the building.

Brickwork Provides a Calming Place to Gather in Indonesia

Text description provided by the architects.

CIREBON, INDONESIA–Alun-alun Kejaksan square, is a 1-hectare gathering square is located in the city of Cirebon in West Java next to the important At-Taqwa Mosque. As SHAU, the architects, explain, on one side of Alun-alun an iconic Gapura was installed marking the entrance from the city and on the opposite side a five-pillar gate was installed marking the entrance from the At-Taqwa Mosque. The opposing gates represent a dialogue between worldly and spiritual needs, emphasizing an open dialogue with the square in-between. They had a number of reasons for choosing brick for the project:

It does not only refer to historical places in Cirebon but adheres to practical aspects like availability, and stimulating the local economy employing local labor and a simple and more forgiving construction process. The material and formal references are also important to gain acceptance and sense of belonging from the citizens, as they are familiar with the design language even though it is done in a contemporary manner.

A Public Building That Represents it’s People

BHUBANESHWAR, INDIA– Bhawan, a government office building in eastern India, was initially envisioned as a typical glass office building for the Department of Agriculture and Farmers’ Empowerment in Bhubaneshwar, the capital of the state of Odisha. But Architectural Record notes that they “gradually warmed up to this unconventional design:”

When Studio Lotus, the Delhi-based architecture firm, got the commission, they took the brief and radically developed it, creating a low-rise redbrick facility that embraces local traditions, deeply engages the public, and tackles climate concerns—all of which are seldom inspirations for modern government buildings in India. Located in the center of the city, near other state facilities, the Krushi Bhawan sits in a garden and is open and inclusive. “We wanted to provide a well-lit and ventilated building, as well as explore the connection of the city to the building’s interiors,” says Sidhartha Talwar, design principal and cofounder of Studio Lotus. “All of this is missing in the nearby office buildings.”

The result is a brick masterpiece. The Studio notes that Over 100 highly-skilled artisans have come together to create a vibrant and contemporary narrative of traditional Odia craft depicting agricultural folklore and mythological stories, envisioned at an unprecedented architectural scale. For instance, the tribal craft of dhokra (cast metal craft) has been adapted to make light fixtures that wrap around the ground floor columns, as well as metal screens that line the building corridors.

Dine Within Termite-Like Mounds in Yunnan Province Restaurant

DONGFENGYUN, YUNNAN PROVINCE, CHINA–Art and architecture can be powerful forces when it comes to enhancing the dining experience; and when the two disciplines are combined in the right way the results can be spectacular, as this new restaurant in China demonstrates. Designed by Hong Kong architecture studio Cheng Chung Design (CCD) within a structure composed as a land art-esque installation by local Yunnan Province artist Luo Xu – 50% Cloud, as the restaurant is named – is certainly a departure from the norm. 

The project sits within one of a series of distinctive termite mound shaped domes that form a whole area in the city of Dongfengyun. CCD worked on an interior that embraces the organic shapes and flowing red brick character of Luo Xu’s art; but embedded Art Deco references and contemporary tones to enhance functionality and convert the space to a modern restaurant’s needs. 

‘The building looks like a mega art installation and half of a cloud that undulates in the sky,’ say the architects. ‘It features solid facades, curved contours and volumes set at staggering heights.’ The team worked with the structure’s original red brick material, which has been locally produced and blends in easily with the surrounding nature – other materials were kept to a minimum, to respect the building’s original intention and purity. 

Skylights bring in natural light that filters down the soft clay walls and adds to the restaurant’s atmosphere. Dramatic curved lines and vaults are contrasted gently by contemporary furnishings to create a playful environment for the guests. 

The restaurant sits within an area of similar structures that form part of a wider installation by Luo Xu. The brick art complex also includes a multi-function hall, an art gallery and a hotel, whose interior is also created by CCD. 

Set against the Mile City skyline in China’s Yunnan Province, the silhouettes cast by a grouping of red brick towers are equal parts distinctive, otherworldly and alluring. The cluster-like buildings are collectively named 50% Cloud for their resemblance to a half cloud floating in the sky. Bystanders also comment that their whimsical spires are reminiscent of colossal termite mounds, bursting from the red earth below.

Elephant World is a Sanctuary and Museum.

SURIN, THAILAND–Wallpaper describes Thai architect Boonserm Premthada as a tightrope walker, balancing his talent between a sharp, contemporary aesthetic and a site-specific outlook rooted in tradition. One of his projects is a home for both people and elephants in the Surin province of lower north-eastern Thailand that includes a museum built with 480,000 locally sourced ceramic bricks:

Elephant World was created to support the the region’s Kui ethnic people, and their beloved pachyderms. The Kui have been elephant keepers for centuries, considering the noble animals family members, and living with them side by side. However, in recent years, Thailand’s economic boom and urbanization have threatened their way of life.

The local government looked at ways to arrest that decline and create suitable and sustainable living conditions for elephants and humans. Premthada, and his architecture firm Bangkok Project Studio, won the commission and work began in 2015. ‘The architecture performs three functions,’ says the architect. ‘Preserving the culture; reviving the forest to ensure a supply of food and herbal medicines for elephants and providing a water source; and building a self-sufficient community economy through sustainable tourism that respects elephants and the Kui way of life.’

Jaixing Civic Center Undulating Ceramic Roof

JIAXING, CHINA-–MAD Architects have unveiled their ambitious, lyrical design for the Jiaxing Civic Center in China, spanning around 130,000 square meters, the site contains three venues — the science and technology museum, the women and children activity center, and the youth activity center. As MAD explains:

MAD envisions its Jiaxing civic center as an artistic entity on an urban scale. here, architectural forms and landscapes fuse together. with a large circular lawn as the centerpiece, the project is one where both people and buildings can interact and share; forming a more open, intimate, dynamic new urban space. This vast project is covered with locally produced white ceramic panels. responding to the traditional barrel tile roofs of the local villages, while also enhancing the scheme’s economic and energy efficiency. Like a tarp blown by the wind, the tiles bring a soft sense of wrapping to the form. whether you are on the central lawn, outside the park, or on the building’s links and pathways, the scenery seems to change with your movement.

Imperial Kiln Museum

JINGDEZHEN, CHINA—The new Imperial Kiln Museum, a space of majesty and mediation more than exposition, is sited next to the Imperial Kiln ruins surrounded by many ancient kiln complexes. It is alongside the Chang river. Kiln complexes have for eons used this waterway to transport porcelain products.  

Jingdezhen is known as the “Porcelain Capital” of the world because of its early and dominant role in producing porcelain. It was also the site of the Imperial Kilns that exclusively made this “white gold” ware for the Emperor’s courts. The early wares are hugely prized with masterpieces fetching as much as $30 million and more on auction (regardless of scale). Overall, the town has been producing pottery for 1,700 years. In the Ming and Qing dynasties, Jingdezhen exported a huge amount of porcelains to Europe.

The architects, Studio Zhu-Pei explain the project concept:

The Imperial Kiln Museum consists of nine brick vaults based on the traditional form of the kiln, each of the vaults is of a different size, curvature, and length. They were naturally applied to the site, carefully integrated with many existing ruins including a few ruins that were found after the construction. Five sunken courtyards varied in size have a different theme: gold, wood, water, fire, soil. Those five themes not only reflect old Chinese thinking about the earth but also associate with porcelain making techniques.

In using both new recycled kiln bricks to build is a significant character in Jingdezhen because brick kilns have to be demolished for every two or three years in order to keep a certain thermal performance of the kilns. The entire city is covered by recycled kiln bricks. Those bricks record a warmth, inseparable from the lifeblood of the city.

Studio Rap’s Blue and White Gate to Residential Complex.

DELFT, NETHERLANDS– For a new residential building block in Delft, the Netherlands, Studio Rap is planning a gate clad in 3D-printed ceramic tiles that reinterpret the world-famous decorative qualities of Delft blue porcelain, fusing 3D clay printing, computer design and artisanal glazing, revealing the potential of ceramics and ornament in the 21st century. Measuring four meters wide, eight meters high, and 12 meters deep, the gate cover a large public staircase that indicates the communal character of the courtyard. Their deep blue color reflects the connection to delft blue porcelain and the surrounding canals, while it subtly contrasts the earth-toned masonry covering the building to indicate a threshold. The project requires approximately 4.000 contemporary, rich glazed and unique ceramic tiles, which will be 3D printed. As Studio Rap explains:

‘Because the tiles are 3D-printed, applying variation in their shape is rather cheap,’ adds studio RAP. ‘by applying a runny glaze on white-burning clay portions of the tile that are convex (hills) will remain white as the blue glaze pools in the concave (valley) areas of the tile. this poetic method of ‘painting with shape’ allows for smooth transitions between hues of blue and white that are impossible to produce otherwise.’

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Nicki Green (b. Boston, 1986) uses ceramics to make space for the trans body. She utilizes its properties of plasticity and transmutation, or the action of changing into another form, as raw clay itself is a material with alchemical properties, becoming something spectacularly other, once fired and glazed. Her mixed-media sculptural works render the body metaphorically, thematizing sexuality, religion and identity. An emerging artist who is currently in the first decade of her career, Green has already garnered high wattage visibility through her inclusion in the prominent triennial, “Bay Area Now” (2018), held at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, and Craft Contemporary’s second Clay Biennial, titled “The Body, The Object, The Other,” (2020), in Los Angeles.

Metamorphosis and Jewish identity as the primary drivers of Green’s content. Clay is key to rendering the body metaphorically, but also create a morphology of form itself, that, is revising and re-shaping form. To this end, Green reworks ritual objects, inventing them anew, for an expanded, multigenerational, non-binary audience that might partake of them, or find meaning in the sanctity of inclusion itself. Not exclusive to Judaism, religious traditions worldwide enforce traditional male-female gender binaries, which become a barrier to non-binary participation, access, and belonging. Green’s significant and original work functions as a series of challenges to traditions and conventions in three simultaneous arenas: the social rigidity of gender presentation, Judaism, and functional ceramics. Transformation is the subtext of Green’s work, in particular, her use of form itself as a material means of enabling a poetic response to the transgendered body.

From the late 1960s forward, gay and lesbian artists embraced the figure the centerpiece of their practice, mining the construction of identity through the direct representation of the queer body. Photography, video, and film were the dominant modes of exploration, across a wide range of practices, including documentarians like Joan E. Biren (JEB) (b. 1944) and avant-gardists alike, filmmakers such as Kenneth Anger (b. 1927) and Barbara Hammer (1939-2019). In photography, Robert Mapplethorpe (1946-1989) and Catherine Opie (b. 1961) utilized portraiture as a way to affirm the social visibility of queer people, photographing their own homosocial, underground communities. For Mapplethorpe, this consisted of representations of mixed race couples, BDSM sexual practices, sculptural nudes, and self-portraiture. Influenced by Mapplethorpe’s oeuvre, throughout the 1990s, Opie produced portraits of non-binary couples, the BDSM lesbian scene of San Francisco, provocative self-portraits, and lesbian domesticity nationwide. Both photographers oscillated between testing a viewer’s tolerance and subsequent sense of empathy, or, conversely, utter dis-identification. Collectively, this grouping of progenitors was extremely influential to future generations of queer artists, including Green. As she underscores, “Seeing representations of gender variance in such a direct way was what allowed me and allowed [other] trans folks to understand themselves in the world.”[1]

Subsequently, these pioneering queer artists made it possible for Green to pursue a more haptically-driven, or touch-centered, practice, keenly focused on object-making rather than image-producing. For instance, Green’s stoneware Kiddush (2016), the Hebrew word for “sanctification,” remakes the ceremonial wine chalice with layer-upon-layer of purple imagery that pays homage to the sacred actions and sacrifices of previous generations of LGBT Jewish activists and martyrs. The color purple alludes to the LGBT embrace of the terminology “lavender menace,” an epithet aimed at radical lesbians fighting for visibility within the American feminist movement of the 1970s. The phrase itself was coined in 1969 by the renowned feminist writer and activist Betty Freidan, who was herself heterosexual and Jewish. Green utilizes open palms framing an embellished upside down triangle, another reclaimed symbol, forced upon Jewish homosexuals by the Nazis throughout their reign of terror. The open hands are themselves a reference to the Hamsa, a palm-shaped amulet often hung in Jewish homes or worn as jewelry, as a means of deflecting or warding off the evil eye. The actual referent she utilized was the priestly “lifting of the hands,” initially a Jewish tradition early on appropriated by Christianity (and long associated with it). This verbal benediction is denoted through the split fingers (here, inverted to signify the queer triangle), which are sometimes referred to as a lattice through which G-D can look upon a congregation. Such a pattern, what Green calls the “hexagram lattice” is rendered and retained throughout her recent object making.

In 2019, Green was a Resident Artist at the highly selective Arts/Industry program, hosted by Kohler Center for the Arts in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, where the Kohler factory setting offers artists the tantalizing potential to grow the scale and scope of their artistic production. Kohler itself is a company renowned for its kitchen and bathroom fixtures, producing sinks, toilets, and faucets for commercial and residential clientele. Influenced by the setting itself, Green fused the dynamism of gender politics with domestic plumbing and its penchant for hybridity, making double urinals and bidets with decorative flourishes such finnials, faucets, and miniature toilets, such as the highly charged work, A Discrete History of Intimacy and Violence (double urinal basin with faucets) (2019), in which she partially sketches the partitioning of two occupied toilet stalls, in which gender is only potentially revealed through the size and style of shoes. In this scenario, each viewer of the work becomes a voyeur, peeking in the gap under the door so as to discern habitation. This presence on either side of the door causes an automatic tension in dialogue with the sculpture’s evocative title: restrooms are intimate spaces in which our own plumbing is unmasked: the forced reveal of genitalia due to the history of what French psychiatrist Jacques Lacan called, “urinary segregation,” women and men divided by their anatomy. The Canadian queer theorist Sheila Cavanaugh, whose work has been influential to Green, revises this binary, calling the bathroom a “gendered architecture of exclusion,” that defaults to whiteness, associating its aesthetics with a symbolic purity, or, as Green points out, also defaults to acts of violence and aggression toward trans people who are misunderstood as attempting to “pass” as an alternate gender identity, or are rejected for the lack of clear male/female delineation in their gender presentation.[2]  

Green’s sculpture, then, provides a direct critique of the recent transphobic, exclusionary policies regarding bathroom discrimination in which trans people were not initially permitted to utilize the facilities which matched their gender identity in state buildings (a hot-button legislative issue in the state of North Carolina, for instance, known as the “Bathroom Bill”). Again, there are many layers at work here: the frilly decorative shapes and doodles taking up space, a way to nod at the prim conventions associated with 18^th century European porcelain objects, a long ago, but fraught moment when porcelain carried aesthetic and political efficacy simultaneously. The miniature toilets reference bidets, French washbasins invented to clean and freshen up the genital area, and long associated with prostitution, or another marginalized population, the sex worker (often today, one of the mainstay occupations of trans folks). And finally, a reverent kind of reference or kinship to the queer artist Robert Gober, who produced abject sinks and drains throughout the 1990s, though his were minimalist and industrially produced, rather than treated as a drawing surface.  Green articulates her process and careful thinking, which reifies the idea of the toilet as a repository for waste. As she writes: “While making these pieces, I thought of them as Frankensteined Kohler product; I used mostly waste materials (like literally digging through the “cull” or waste bins for wet, failed product to cut up and reassemble) to make washing/ablution ritual objects that affirm the queer body.”

During this same span of time, Green activated the mikveh, a Jewish ritual bath in which observant women habitually dip as a form of ritual immersion, arriving at purity after menstruation. There are also other uses of the mikveh: it is a bath utilized prior to conversion and marriage ceremonies, and before the Jewish High Holidays.

In 1977, at the New York alternative space Franklin Furnace, the performance artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles made the first known avant-garde performances around mikveh, exploring its entwined spiritual and religious significance as both a feminist and an observant Jew.[3] Unlike Ukeles, however, Green decided not to use her own body in the creation of her work. Instead, given its utilitarian materiality— made entirely from white porcelain—she treated the mikveh as an architectonic space. One of the staunch requirements of functional vessels is that they perform as “water tight,” that is, they don’t leach water through dripping or leaking. Green’s mikveh pieces are the opposite of this ceramic ethos.

Mikveh for Mychotheology (2018), a mixed media earthenware sculpture is one such piece, approximating a wash basin or ewer that is split in half, lined with decorative white tiles in which androgynous figures ring the interior. They are depicted in a vaguely ancient schema, all in profile and without individual features, as though part of an archeological mural program inscribed upon temple walls. A single androgyne stands, a flat disk encircling their head, doubling as a head covering or medieval halo. All the others squat in what seems initially to be a repose of prayer, but in actuality, is a harvesting of mushrooms. 

Mycology is the study of fungi, and mushrooms are themselves a fungus, and one of Green’s key, early symbols. She created a number of mushroom pieces, such as Morel Figure (2016), referencing the porosity and replication practices of mushrooms themselves, which, as spores, emerge all at once, an entire being, rather than a seedling that sprouts over time. This idea of full emergence, rather than piecemeal growth, becomes an important metaphorical rendering of the trans body, a means of establishing wholeness and radiance all at once—total acceptance, so to speak, rather than a careful and quiet unfurling of reveal: a single stem, the underside of a leaf. Green’s mushrooms are carefully androgynous: rendered as sensuous, multipartite organisms, wholly reflective of the simultaneous means of sexual and asexual reproduction possible in spores, which have web-like networks below the surface, their root systems akin to the idea of a communal support system that often goes unseen in the lives of queer people.

Addressing the gender complexities of Jewish death rituals, Pillar of Earth (all 2020) is Green’s most recent body of work. A series of ten bucket stands, Green extends the timeline of ritual cleansing to the moments beyond life, including the washing of the recently deceased. In the midst of a worldwide pandemic, this has strong resonance. Each work bucket is itself a found object, emblazoned with a contemporary logo, adapted to a wide variety of functions, from carrying tools to storing kosher pickles. Each rests on a handmade ceramic pedestal, embellished with a textured honeycomb patterning and her signature hexagram latticework with purple “grout.” These works are based upon the tradition known as “Shemira,” the washing and watching over the body from death until burial, a liminal, transcendent time in which certain rites are performed in order to guard the spirit, still considered present in the body. These guardians are gendered positions: a shomeret for women, and a shomer for men. With these works, Green provides a pathos for the disparity—and despair—of how a Jewish non-gender conforming person such as herself would be attended, and perceived. These works highlight the elegiac mysticism and transcendent beauty of Jewish ritual. Anything less is considered a humiliation of the dead.

Green’s sculptural objects amplify a deeper spiritual significance while honoring the history of otherness and marginalization, threefold: in the materiality of craft, in Judaism as a minority religion, and trans identity as a sexual minority, bringing them to center of conversation through her deeply conversant knowledge of Judaism, and the histories of functional and ritual objecthood.

[1] Zoom conversation with the author, August 5, 2020.

[2] Sheila Cavanaugh, “Gender, Sexuality and Race in the Lacanian Mirror: Urinary Segregation and the Bodily Ego,” in Psychoanalytic Geographies, Paul Kingsbury and Steve Pile, eds. (London and New York: Routledge, 2014), 323.

[3] See David Sperber, “Mikva Dreams: Judaism, Feminism, and Maintenance in the Art of Mierle Laderman Ukeles.” Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 5.2 (Fall 2019), online. https://editions.lib.umn.edu/panorama/tag/david-sperber/. Accessed August 20, 2020.

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LOS ANGELES––Kathy Butterly‘s Yellow Haze exhibition at Shoshana Wayne Gallery (22 January – 15 May 2021) features new works characterized by Butterly’s restrictive scale and painterly glaze experimentations. This latest body of work, made over the past 12 months of lockdown in her New York studio, pushes her practice in a new direction— slightly larger clay forms are in evidence, to give herself, Butterly says, “a bigger canvas with which to work.”

“I find a strength in the intimate,” she explains, “I find power in scale shifts within the works, I enjoy making works that are not rushed and demand a lot of skill and knowledge. The small scale is very demanding. I have a deep understanding and relationship with my materials and this skill allows me to work with passion and allow humor to flow. Beauty, humor, awkwardness are all important to me. Humor is a gateway to provoking deeper thoughts, tough thoughts.

I choose not to take up a lot of space with my artwork, to impose, but rather to engage the time and thinking of viewers. The works sort of demand you look at them and you take time to look at them —smaller forms pull you in and you spend a lot of time looking at them, they keep unraveling information. Environmentally I also do not want to create a large footprint, that is important to me as a world citizen.”

Explore more of Butterly’s works on Cfile.

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Saaristo says she’s always built her themes around around narratives which usually play out as she works through her process often taking months to reach a finalized project. 

“Kinderszenen is a collection of ceramic sculptures and drawings related to childhood, childhood fairy tales and stories, and the difficult nature of being human. The title refers to Robert Schumann’s set of pieces for piano of the same name, which look at childhood from the nostalgic perspective of an adult.” — Saarista

Saaristo explains her work in clay was born from attempts to draw three-dimensional shapes. The artist has just under two years of experience working in the medium. Even so, her vision and execution is exquisite, and grounded in her two-dimensional work. 

“I hand sculpt my clay works as if I were drawing. I make approximate figures; cut out their limbs and details; reshape, engrave and hollow them and then reattach them to create an entity. When I draw I use a mirror, and I do the same when I work with clay, but the biggest difference between the two techniques is that my sculptures are mainly based on visions and I’m no longer limited to referencing a real model. I avoid using photographs in my drawing, which is why it’s a very time-consuming process for me; when I sculpt my visions, my method allows for mistakes and brings joy and pure creativity to my art-making.” — Saaristo

Stiina Saaristo (b. 1976) graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki in 2005. She is one of the most original visual artists of her generation. Saaristo paints and makes charcoal and pencil drawings and has also started making sculptures from porcelain paper clay. She makes her works alone at her studio. Creating a sculpture involves several phases, first shaping it without moulds, followed by several rounds of firing with surface stains and glazing. Saaristo’s drawings and sculptures manifest the meticulous method that is so characteristic of her. One might say that her sculptures are a continuation of her drawings. She has used herself as a caricature model in works of both types and addressed themes related to womanhood.

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In the first chapter, the artist as a guest presents the themes underlying his work in six showcases wherein visitors can trace the elements that characterize his practice: the reuse of materials and architectural construction techniques, his references to craftsmanship and spirituality, his employment of the stereotypical imagery imposed on the African-American community, the use of symbols from the civil rights movement, and the presence of archival material such as magazines, books, music, and films that constitute Gates’ universe.

The second phase of the show invokes the artist as an interlocutor. Here, Gates reveals the complexity of his relationship to ceramics —which comprises both intellectual and tactile aspects— in a site-specific installation divided into two parts. The first is a precise and clean presentation of his works distributed throughout the space as if they were in an antique Chinese porcelain boutique. The second part is a reconstruction of his potter’s workshop presenting many plates, cups, bowls, vases, and other utilitarian ceramics alongside artworks made using similar techniques.

The flowing tableaux culminated with the artist’s complete occupation of the space with artworks displayed as they would be in a private home.

Text (edited) from Gallery

View Gate’s works in beautiful installation at Prada Rong Zhai.

About the Artist: Theaster Gates lives and works in Chicago, US. He creates work that focuses on space theory and land development, sculpture and performance. Drawing on his interest and training in urban planning and preservation, Gates redeems spaces that have been left behind. Known for his recirculation of art-world capital, Gates creates work that focuses on the possibility of the “life within things.” Gates smartly upturns art values, land values, and human values. In all aspects of his work, he contends with the notion of Black space as a formal exercise – one defined by collective desire, artistic agency, and the tactics of a pragmatist.

Read more on Gates on Cfile.org.

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Raven Halfmoon, Bold and Brilliant. 

Miami—Bill Brady presented Caddo Girl in a Material World (November 7 – December 5, 2020) an exhibition of new sculptures by Raven Halfmoon focused on ideas of traditionalism vs materialism. 

Raven Halfmoon creates powerful, often large-scale ceramic sculptures that speak to the artist’s identity as both a citizen of the Caddo Nation and a contemporary woman. She channels her ancestral legacy while being true to the present time. Halfmoon’s works reflect ideas of her tribal identity and traits of her millennial peers. Frequently in her sculptures the application of glazes resemble makeup, jewelry and tattoos as well as facets of herself, family and ancestors. She references themes in pop culture that are then carved from the past and embellished in timeless stoneware clay. Many of the designs on the sculptures are culled from traditional Caddo iconography. In “She’s Something Else” stripes run from the lips to the neck in red—a color that signifies wounds, war, blood and earth. 

Furthermore, each work has her name scrawled on them, glaze dripping in all caps. Each a fierce beauty demanding attention with the same intensity as the quiet profound gaze of each face. Clay is layered with rounded forms; the thumbprints form a pattern which is made using an ancient Caddo technique of “punctating.” The result is a distinctively textured surface. Halfmoon seeks to create a dialogue between how she represents herself and her culture and the limited way society chooses to characterize the outsider. 

Qwist Joseph Explores Home and Chance Encounter. 

Denver— Qwist Joseph’s exhibition Filling Station at the Vicki Myhren Gallery, University of Denver, is impressive both for the tri-part exhibition itself but also for the journey it represents elevating this young artist in the pantheon of the top sculptors working with ceramics. There is now a maturity to his art that has struggled in the past to find voice. He effortlessly brings materials and styles from a comic face to three ladies in a Barbara Hepworth kind of abstraction and full length figurative realism and yet the eclecticism is a kind of connective tissue that links and feeds the central premise of the show.

The exhibition title, Filling Station, references the Conoco station on Downing Street, located less than a mile from campus where this show took place: 

This is where my mom met the biological father of my older brother and sister. During my residency, I have been reflecting on the idea that without that chance encounter, and the abuse that ensued thereafter, my younger sister and I would never have come to be. Put simply, my family wouldn’t be what it is, and that’s a fact I’ve historically taken for granted.

To explore this complex story, I broke it down into the most fundamental narrative arc: birth, life, and death. With three distinct rooms, the architecture of the gallery lent itself to this triptych telling. The viewer is invited to peer into strange and intimate personal moments, both real and imagined. There’s a retelling of my birth story with an adult me present, an interrogation of manhood and my own sexual awakening, and finally an exploration of loss, which took on new meaning with the dawning of the coronavirus pandemic.

Through this making, I’ve discovered that I still don’t know exactly what home means. It seems at once, space, a place, and a feeling. Something people yearn for, and something others flee. I am, however, certain of one thing. The reason I didn’t think about home for so long is because, as a white man, I didn’t have to. For my family, that safety and security was a given. By examining the ways privilege, trauma, and mobility operated in my own domestic history, I want to erode my ignorance and challenge this unjust reality. In August, my partner and I will move back to Southern California, where we will continue the search for our own home.

See more of Qwist’s work on cfile.

Shecket’s First at Pace 

New York— Pace Gallery presented Skirts (February 28 – August 14, 2020), it’s first solo exhibition of works by Arlene Shechet, concurrent with the Whitney Museum’s exhibition Making Knowing, which also features works by Shechet. Skirts brings together more than a dozen of the artist’s most recent sculptures, including large-scale works.

Utilizing a title that is both a noun and a verb, Skirts is a testament to the artist’s fluid and unformulaic process. Though her works appear effortless and forgiving of imperfections, they are the belabored products of an intuitive and technically fastidious approach, involving casting, painting, firing, carving, stacking, undoing and redoing with no predetermined endpoint. Her expansive approach to sculpture and materials is reminiscent of artists Shechet admires, such as Sophie Taeuber-Arp and Sonia Delaunay, whose work transcends the divisions of painting and sculpture and encompassed innovative multimedia practices, distinguishing their work from that of their male peers. Shechet’s title, Skirts, also reclaims misogynist slang. As if to counter this term’s reduction of women to passive things, Shechet’s unruly, polymorphous sculptures suggest that objects themselves are active and subversive.

Rose B. Simpson’s Duo: Loyal alter-egos, Potent Allies, Twins Separated at Birth.

SAN FRANCISCO—Looking back in our pending file we found this exhibition that missed being published first time round. So we resurrected it.  Jessica Silverman Gallery presented Duo, (October 29-December 20, 2019) a solo show by Rose B. Simpson, featuring sculptures that are made at the same time in pairs. Their titles are suffixed 1 and A (rather than #1 and #2) as they are equal originals, loyal alter-egos, potent allies, twins separated at birth. 

Made from clay with wood, metal and leather adornments, the figures are meant to help us ground ourselves in reality. They bear witness; seeking to dispel delusion and deceit, totems that guide us back to our deeper selves, our common human ancestry.

Simpson comes from a Pueblo famous for the ceramics its women have produced since the 6^thcentury AD. An apprentice to her mother, an acclaimed native artist, Simpson grew up expressing herself in three-dimensions, mastering a wide range of ceramic, textile and metalwork practices. After three university degrees, including an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, Simpson is also well versed in contemporary art, inspired by artists as diverse as Lee Bontecou and Alberto Giacometti. A bold innovator, Simpson combines tribal belief systems with high art concepts and apocalyptic science-fiction forms.

The Pairing of Linda Sormin and Gail Wight is Simply Natural.

SAN FRANCISCO—Patricia Sweetow Gallery presented Deep Dazzle (February 29 – April 11, 2020), a synergistic duo with Bay Area artist Gail Wight with Hexapodarium, digital archival prints; and the ceramic/paper sculpture of New York artist Linda Sormin. 

Gail Wight has created two distinct species of flora and fauna using organic material least suited to her goal. Linda Sormin is upending traditions and materials in her media-exploding mix of ceramic/paper sculpture. 

Linda Sormin’s sculpture is a cinematic stride through storytelling, a “non-linear assemblage of fact and fiction.” She describes her process as “unbuilding,” as she “rolls and pinches clay into forms that melt, lean, lurch and dare you to approach.” Shards, souvenirs, test tiles and trash are collected into ceramic structures, an archeological mash, disgorging place, affiliation, gender and culture. This brew of delicate intersections collides with dislocated memorabilia – form and content are subjected to the hazards of making and firing. Sormin’s sculptural process inquires, “What is worth risking? What might be discovered?”

Trained In traditional methods of clay forming, Sormin strives to decolonize ceramics by subverting correctness. In this light, a recent addition to her sculpture is watercolor paintings on paper. She cuts, following the forms in the brushwork, then soaks the paper in resin which seamlessly folds into the evolution of the work. 

Born in Thailand, raised and educated in Canada and the U.S., Sormin attributes the intricate work and diverse media in her sculptures to traditional craft practices learned in Thailand and Laos. In her 20s, she created floral floats and wreaths with groups of women, in preparation for rituals and festivals. “Mounds of fragrant material – orchids, marigolds, jasmine blossoms, bamboo leaves, string and gold leaf – surrounded us as we pieced together objects that offered meaning and function beyond the everyday.” Those influences shaped her approach to sculpture, culminating a process that reflects the precarious complexity and chaos in life.

Nathalie Du Pasquier Builds Beauty, Brick by Brick.

FIORANA, Italy—Artist and designer Nathalie Du Pasquier has translated her fascination with bricks into a site-specific exhibition, Bric, comprising seven totem-like sculptures made from stacked bricks glazed in bright colors for Italian ceramics brand Mutina, which operates the MUT exhibition space at its headquarters in Fiorano. It was briefly reviewed in Dezeen:

The exhibition, which was curated by Sarah Cosulich, features seven sculptural structures that rise from the sand-covered floor of the building designed by Angelo Mangiarotti in the 1970s. The starting point for each sculpture was the humble brick, which has been a recurring element in Du Pasquier’s work – particularly her paintings.

“I know nothing about bricks,” she said in an interview with Cosulich for the exhibition’s catalogue. “For me they are strange, anonymous objects I have inserted sometimes in the still lifes I paint.”

Different types of brick are glazed in bright colours and layered to produce geometric shapes that are reminiscent of Du Pasquier’s paintings, as well as some of the Memphis Group’s sculptural furniture. In several of the sculptures, the bricks are turned to display their inner structure. In this way their structural value is compromised but they take on a more decorative quality as patterned units.

A Doyle Lane Weed Pot is Some Kind of Magic.

Los Angeles— David Kordansky Gallery presented Weed Pots (July 22 – August 29, 2020), an exhibition of ceramic vessels by Doyle Lane. Curated by artist Ricky Swallow, featuring over five dozen examples of Lane’s iconic, small-scale weed pots made between the late 1950s and late 1970s, on loan from collections throughout California, including the California African American Museum. 

Doyle Lane (1923-2002, Los Angeles) is a significant, if underknown, voice in West Coast ceramic sculpture. His delicate vases and rigorous wall murals are expressions of a masterful command of traditional techniques; an innovative, tactile approach to glazing; and a quietly visionary understanding of geometry and three-dimensional form. 

He worked from a home studio in the El Sereno district of Los Angeles for the majority of his career, producing highly focused, exquisitely proportioned objects sought after by many architects and designers throughout the region. Very much a mid-century “production potter,” Lane would sell his pots directly to loyal collectors while also pursuing large-scale architectural commissions. 

One of these, commissioned by architect Welton Becket in 1964 for Mutual Savings and Loan offices in Pasadena, Calif., has been installed in the courtyard of the June and Merle Banta Education Center at The Huntington. Measuring roughly 17 by 8 feet, the work consists of hand-formed tiles, each glazed a warm red and tinged with black edges. To learn about its restoration, click here.

As a Black artist, he exhibited at notable Los Angeles galleries founded during the Civil Rights and Black Arts movements, including Ankrum Gallery and Brockman Gallery. In a review of this exhibition in the New York Times the writer describes that while his work did not express black activism he certainly did suffer from racism’s random humiliations.

The weed pots—so named because they were designed to hold individual sprigs and dried flowers—were among his most consistent sites of experimentation. In a 2014 essay on Lane’s work, Swallow describes them as “jewels of California modernism [that] are most credibly understood and appreciated when viewed in groupings, which is how Doyle conceived and marketed them in both gallery presentations and architectural commissions. In this context, one can see the subtle shifts in scale and form of the pots, some plump and spherical with tiny collared throats, some wider—more UFO-like (think Nelson lamp) with flattened openings just large enough to support a single twig. This combined with the matte-satin glazed surfaces, varying in color and activity, creates a real rhythm in the groupings and gives one an abridged glimpse into the working nature and diversity of Lane’s talents.”

In an interview with artist Stanley Wilson, published as part of a feature entitled “Black Artists of Los Angeles” that appeared in a 1981 issue of Studio Potter magazine and was introduced by artist John Outterbridge, Lane observed: “When you’re seeking fame, you force yourself to try and become clever and to be better than somebody else, which can be a very unhealthy situation there. I think the best way to seek fame is not to seek it, and to do just what you have to do—or can do—and let it go at that. To be spiritual is to be balanced.”

Kay Whitney Explores Mark Del Vecchio’s Shadow 

Santa Fe—Cary Esser, Del Harrow, Ben Jackel, Jami Porter Lara and Matthew McConnell are five artists selected by curator, Mark Del Vecchio for an exhibition at Peters Contemporary that Kay Whitney writes, “use black’s spectrum of meanings in their work to expand it past the abstract boundaries. Their works express a personal shadow as well as a societal one. Dark clays tend to be the exception rather than the rule, although black can’t escape its entrapment in the reverse side of a binary”.

In her excellent review for Ceramics Monthly she explains further:

A shadow is something cut off from light, possibly ambiguous. In a more interesting territory it’s a phantom, a follower or constant companion, a shelter, an obscurity, a trace. Because it’s part of a binary, it also represents alternative possibilities. It is in this last sense that the five artists in the exhibition Shadow situate their work.

It’s no oversight that Mark Del Vecchio, the exhibition’s curator, has entitled it Shadow—it’s both as singular noun and a phenomenon that concerns him. His choice of these five artists encompasses Jung’s notion of the shadow as the seat of the creative unconscious. Del Vecchio has placed disparate dark objects next to each other and without didactic prodding asks the viewer to decide the relationship between them.

Learn more in Cfile about Cary Esser, Ben Jackel, Del Harrow, Jami Porter Lara, and Matthew McConnell.

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The biscuit porcelain vase was based on a digital sketch by van Herpt and realized into a physical object using tools and machines he has crafted and developed over the years. The translation retains the nature of the material while overcoming typical limitations, including collapsing during printing and shrinking when fired in the high-temperature kiln. The additive printing process simultaneously generates the vase’s exterior and interior, resulting in an incredibly thin and intricate shell. Its mesmerizing design flows as a singular and precise expression of its construction. 

Since 2013, van Herpt has continuously created various objects and projects to push the limits of 3D printing and redefine its visual language. Many have been showcased in exhibitions and museums, and the porcelain vase is his first large edition and entry into the world of mass production. Both an object of beauty and a marvel of engineering, it offers a glimpse into the uncharted possibilities of ceramic design and production.

Learn more here.

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Rochefort, the Gallery notes, uses ceramic and glazes to create arresting ceramic sculptures that suggest forms or phenomena in the natural world. Each work is built up of layers of mud and slip clay, which the artist repeatedly breaks and builds back meticulously over a period of time, and then fires, airbrushes, and glazes – over multiple firings, or as the artist enthuses, “as many glazes as possible until I can’t fire anymore.”

All of Brian Rochefort’s works and their titles, are based on traveling to remote areas around the world, such as the Bolivian Amazon, the Serengeti in Tanzania, and the Choco Cloud Forest in Ecuador among so many other places. Also protected barrier reefs in Africa and the Galapagos Islands.

The title to most of his shows is a product of doomsday scenarios. 
 
His new show “Stellar Gems”, at Bernier / Eliades Gallery, follows the Milan theme in describing in chaotic debris that is the aftermath of a fictitious comet or asteroid that hits the planet.

“My sculptures look alien, exotic, from outer space or from the depths of the ocean. 
I want the viewer to sense these objects are extraordinary, from the future or from the past. My goal is to make sculptures that look chaotic and broken yet controlled and beautiful with vibrant colors and textures that nod to Ab-Ex artists like Franz West and Wilhelm DeKooning.”

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“In No Fake, Johannes Nagel reverences his ultimate expression, which is a place of truth and tangible, tactile presence. Pure gesture is frozen precisely at the interface between mental design and practical realization on the material itself – where consciousness meets the world. His works can at times be perceived as provocatively disharmonious, with a fragile equilibrium and bursting with flaws and cracks which he purposely assumes and accentuates.

Aldonso Palacio

Committed to exploring the myriad ways of producing a vessel, Nagel invites pure kinetic impulse and improvisation throughout his process. The vessel forms themselves are merely the surviving outcomes of Nagels’ variable investigations wherein each new stage and factor, like slip-casting porcelain in sand, is able to produce infinite possibilities.

“He performs a transformation of the ceramic vessel into free plasticity and deconstructs both the historic and contemporary meanings of the term “vase“. They are too disparate for flowers – they draw all attention to themselves with their breaks, irregularities and fragile equilibrium…He shatters conventions with innovative methods and deconstructionist techniques.” 

Nagel goes so far as to deconstruct and reinterpret the vessel form to the point where the ‘vase’ identifier becomes obsolete as “these containers full of holes, the interior competes with and complements the exterior; together they resists the very idea of ‘containing.'” And yet, through Nagel’s experimentation and taxonomic obliteration, the visual language which transduce the archetypal vessel form is made even more apparent.

“They are all original, genuine, no copies, no fake. Ever aiming for more singularity, now he flirts at some level with the graffiti sub tone. The new work has a number of variations of spraying of colour that quests for a fresh aesthetic combined with the glazes. Shape-wise he aims for a distorted rotational symmetry and a vague vase outline in new constructions that revolution around their axis, as if they were spinning off a DJ turntable.”

About the Artist: Born in 1979 in Jena. Lives and works in Halle (Saale), Germany, Johannes Nagel studied at University of Art and Design Burg Giebichenstein, where he was also an assistant professor. He began his career as a potter as an apprentice to Japanese-born Canadian ceramist, Kinya Ishikawa in Val-David, Quebec. He has since developed an international dossier of shows, awards, and residencies. Nagel’s work is shown and collected internationally, and may be glimpsed in a diverse set of museum collections, including the Victoria and Albert Museum, The Ariana, and the Keramion. Most recently, Nagel has been awarded the Keramikmuseum’s  2019 Westerwald Prize, one of the highest awards for ceramics in Europe.

Read more at Jason Jacques Gallery here
Read more at Cfile.org.

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Lois Dodd’s paintings depict landscapes and locations— the Lower East Side in New York City, rural Mid-Coast Maine and the Delaware Water Gap in New Jersey— where the artist has lived and worked for over seventy years. Often completed in one session, Dodd’s intimate, small-scaled works feature the plants, trees, buildings, laundry, and moonlit sky that she has observed and recorded across seasons and over years. Dodd’s flat, distilled imagery is rendered with thin paint in luscious colors—ochres, pinks, greens and blues—and quick strokes that exist on their own as pure abstraction freed from descriptive responsibility. Her sensitive and emotive surfaces capture both the immediacy of direct experience of each place—the motion, light and feeling —as well as the spiritual aspects of the landscape.

A work from 2008 contains the image of an apple tree dappled with spring light in a foggy field; a work created seven years later shows what could be the same tree, now mature and full with fruit, framed through Dodd’s barn window. Dodd’s prolonged engagement with her subjects makes meaning— close attention to details, rhythms and changes across days and seasons adds up to a lifetime of wonder and a lasting record of place and experience.

California artist Sharif Farrag’s sculptural ceramic vessels contain a clash of references and values, offering cacophonies of thorny vines, skulls, comic book figures, dollar store trinkets, muscle cars, mosquitos and mythical creatures fashioned from a riot of colors and glazes. The artist’s objects and installations pull from his experience growing up as the child of immigrants in California’s San Fernando Valley. As a first generation Muslim American coming of age in the years immediately following 9/11, Farrag found refuge and community in the punk, graffiti and skateboard subcultures of the Los Angeles suburbs.

These early experiences helped to shape a personal iconography that is also deeply influenced by the visual, cultural and social traditions brought by his parents from their native countries of Egypt and Syria. Indebted to California’s funk art movement, Farrag’s vessels and figurative ceramics incorporate humor, autobiographical and surrealist elements, as well as unconventional forms and media, filtered through the perspective of his own generation.

About the Artists: Lois Dodd (b. 1927) has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions throughout the United States, including shows at Ogunquit Museum of American Art, ME (2018); Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, M (2014); Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, ME (2004); Montclair Art Museum, NJ (1996); and Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH (1990). A retrospective organized in 2012 by the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO, travelled to Portland Museum of Art, ME, the following year. From 1971 to 1992, Dodd taught at Brooklyn College, NY. She has also held positions at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and Vermont Studio Center. Her work can be found in numerous public collections including The Art Institute of Chicago; Hall Art Foundation, Holle; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven. Dodd lives and works between Maine, the Delaware Water Gap, and New York, NY. Sharif Farrag (b. 1993) lives and works in Los Angeles. He has been an artist in residence at the Ceramics Department of California State University Long Beach since 2018, and in 2019 he was awarded a residency at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. He holds a BFA from the University of Southern Californ

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Imagine these three streams coursing into the just-arriving present, then joining into a single mighty flow, and you will begin to understand the work of Johannes Nagel. He has been influenced by them all, via a curious geographical and professional itinerary.

Though born in Jena, he received his initial training in Quebec, under the Japanese potter Kinya Ishikawa. It was a fortunate first connection, for his teacher gently steered him away from narrow perfectionism. (‘I’m the one who criticizes your work,’ he remembers Ishikawa saying. ‘You should just be enthusiastic.’)

At this early stage, Nagel was sufficiently entranced by Japanese aesthetics that he even considered apprenticing with Warren McKenzie, the leading exponent of Japanese-derived aesthetics in America. Instead, he ended up returning to Germany, studying at the University of Art and Design in Halle, where he has been based since. It was at this point that Nagel began learning about Bauhaus precedent – the crisply delineated forms of Otto Lindig and Marguerite Wildenhain, often conceived with an eye toward serial production.

In the postwar era, this formalist strand had been carried forward by figures like Beate Kuhn in West Germany, while in the East (where Halle is located), there was a pronounced tendency toward figuration, under the leadership of Gertraud Möhwald. (Most of the older ceramists that Nagel encountered in Halle were students of Möhwald.)

At a time when explicitly political art was verboten, ceramics could fly under the radar of official Communist censorship, expressing a haunting existentialism with tacitly political implication. To this already dynamic mix of influences, Nagel soon added the ideas of the California clay revolution of the 1950s and ‘60s, as exemplified by Peter Voulkos and Jun Kaneko. Inclined even in his early career toward loose and experimental work, Nagel gravitated to this precedent, taking on its muscular abstraction and improvisatory composition.

He came to understand how ‘energy could be stored in the clay,’ and how familiar forms – handles, rims, spouts – could be transformed through sculptural intelligence. Speaking of transformation – it is one thing to be exposed to multiple precedents; another to try to merge them; a third still to build something new, making one’s influences more than the sum of their parts.

This has been Nagel’s achievement, as this exhibition at Taste Contemporary (March 18 – April 25, 2021) makes abundantly evident. His crucial breakthrough came when he began experimenting with sand-casting. Well known to metalsmiths, this technique is not commonly used in ceramics (who typically use plaster molds).

Nagel had briefly flirted with the process more than a decade ago, but it was only relatively recently that he began a deeper exploration of its possibilities. At a certain level, his technique is simple: he digs a hole in a box of sand, fills it with liquid slip, and then, after allowing some drying time, allows the extra slip to run out of the bottom.

Enough clay clings to the interior of the mold that he is left with a thin-walled object, which traces the interior volume of the shape he has excavated. Typically, Nagel uses this unorthodox means to fashion volumes within the familiar typology of the vase. But as he works, he follows his instincts, departing from predictable pot-shapes that could be envisioned in the mind. Unlike wheel-throwing, the more traditional means of rapidly forming clay, his works of course need not be symmetrical.

He has been able to find forms that are novel, lopsided, strange. Seamless and complete, they have the quality of things born, not made. Nagel chose the fitting name Stegreif – ‘improvisation’ – for one series of these sand-cast pieces, underlining the importance of instinct in their creation. Yet he acknowledges that ‘the hands learn very quickly, and the innocence is soon gone.’

So, he has pushed himself to expand his vocabulary. He has, for example, placed flat plaster bats at the end of some of his tunnels, so that the amorphous shape is intersected by a rigid plane. And – in a particularly generative move – he has dug interconnected channels into the sand, like a network of animal burrows. Once cast into positive, the hollow spaces become complex openwork compositions. One of these latter sculptures, Tangled Construction/White, calls to mind a group of dancers, hands joined. The same work exemplifies the subtlety of Nagel’s surfaces, which are extensively worked after the casting is complete.

While essentially monochrome, Tangled, features a range of mark-making and textural variation: attenuated strokes of yellow and red tracing the object’s contours; drifts of cobalt blue glaze; and a slim gray pedestal, on which the work rests. Other works included in the present exhibition feature a diversity of different surface effects.

Nagel often scores the whole exterior of a pot in whorled patterns, somewhat like finger prints; glazing brings the topology into visual relief. A piece called Coloured Construction is painted in a patchwork of hazy polychrome; it would seem to answer in the affirmative a question that Nagel has asked himself: ‘can a sculpture be blurry?’ And in the series, Lust for Lustre, he combines celadon – the blue-green glaze hallowed in the Chinese tradition – with metallic lustre glazes, more readily associated with European Art Nouveau. It’s a good example of the way that Nagel re-mixes ceramic history, acknowledging its vastness while also making it his own.

As he digs deeper, both literally and figuratively, he is finding new ways to explore his medium’s history: an archaeological aesthetic, in which the hole is itself the key finding. This observation takes us back where we began, to Nagel’s handling of his primary influences. Looking at his assembled work, you will catch sight of the wonky asymmetries seen in the Japanese tradition; the strong silhouettes of the Bauhaus; the painterly vigor of Voulkos and Kaneko.

These signals only come through fitfully, like radio transmissions tuned in during a storm, emerging into legibility, then receding again into an overall impression of energetic flux. The metaphor of a dance again seems appropriate, here: a triadic ballet, to borrow the title of a famous Bauhaus collaboration, in which previously antithetical tendencies make discordant yet beautiful music together.

Nagel’s work is anything but still, then. Even so, it can profitably be viewed in relation to the genre of still life, which is always just around the corner where ceramics are concerned. Think, when looking at his groupings of objects, of the paintings of Giorgio Morandi; or, when examining his atypically aggressive Armoured Vase, of early Cubism. Like all the most accomplished contemporary artists working in clay – Andrew Lord, Rebecca Warren, and Arlene Shechet come to mind – Nagel makes objects that assert themselves in space, yet are also pictorial, sitting at the junction between fact and fiction. At this upper echelon of achievement, the conventional lines between disciplines fall away, established idioms yielding to the force of creation itself. ‘If I had to place myself,’ Nagel says, ‘I would be somewhere in between’.

View the exhibition catalogue here.

Essay by Glenn Adamson
Images by Tom Dachs

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Nairobi–Nzambi Matee’s small workshop may seem chaotic to outsiders but the 29-year-old Matee, an inventor and entrepreneur, is at home here. This is where she developed the prototype for a machine that turns discarded plastic into paving stones – an invention that underpins her company, Gjenke Makers. Her success is our Not-Clay-But story this issue. 

Each day, her business churns out 1,500 plastic pavers, prized by schools and homeowners because they are both durable and affordable. Gjenge Makers is also giving a second life to plastic bottles and other containers which would otherwise end up in landfills or, worse, on Nairobi’s streets.

Prior to launching her company, Matee worked as a data analyst and oil-industry engineer. After encountering plastic waste along Nairobi’s streets, she decided to quit her job and created a small lab in her mother’s backyard, testing sand and plastic combinations. Matee eventually received a scholarship to study in the materials lab at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where she ultimately developed a prototype for the machine that now produces the textured bricks.

“It is absurd that we still have this problem of providing decent shelter – a basic human need,” said Matee. “Plastic is a material that is misused and misunderstood. The potential is enormous, but its after life can be disastrous.”

Gjenge pavers are fully certified by the Kenyan Bureau of Standards. They have a melting point over 350°C, and they are much stronger than their concrete or ceramic equivalents.

For her work, Matee was recently named a Young Champion of the Earth by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). The award provides seed funding and mentorship to promising environmentalists as they tackle the world’s most pressing challenges.

“We must rethink how we manufacture industrial products and deal with them at the end of their useful life,” said Soraya Smaoun, who specializes in industrial production techniques with UNEP.  “Nzambi Matee’s innovation in the construction sector highlights the economic and environmental opportunities when we move from a linear economy, where products, once used, are discarded, to a circular one, where products and materials continue in the system for as long as possible.” 

At 26 years of age, Nzambi Matee found she could no longer stare at the plastic bags that littered Nairobi’s streets, the local government never sent anyone to clean them up, and she resolved to do something about them herself, telling Reuters that “I was tired of being on the sidelines.”

Bone Damage Identifies 3,000 Woman as a Potter

Science Mag reveals that while pottery was a male-dominated profession in ancient Greece, some 3000 years ago, at least one woman from the island of Crete broke the mold to become what they claim to be “the only known female master ceramicist in antiquity”. That claim may be a little sweeping, to say nothing of spurious, but archeologists, after lengthy biomechanical analysis of skeletal remains, found the 3,000-year-old skeleton of a woman potter who lived to be about 45 or 50, in Eleutherna. Ornate pottery in nearby graves suggests she lived between 900 B.C.E. and 650 B.C.E. As Michael Price writes: 

On closer examination of her bones, archaeologists noticed some intriguing details: Compared with other women at the Orthi Petra burial site, she was unusually muscular, especially on the right side of her body. She had also worn out the cartilage in her knee and hip joints, which would have made moving a painful, bone-scraping affair.

Curious as to what repetitive, lifelong motions would have led to that kind of wear, the researchers began to analyze the biomechanics behind the different professions of ancient women, pantomiming the motions with a human skeletal model and observing which muscles were involved. They tried clothes washing, bread baking, harvesting, and loom weaving—nothing panned out. Expanding their search beyond traditional female roles, they tried throwing pottery.

The daughter of a modern-day master ceramicist—and a potter in her own right—just minutes from Eleutherna agreed to model for the scientists. Analyzing her muscles as she worked, they were convinced that her profession was a match for their ancient artisan. Constantly flexing her leg to turn the kick wheel would have worn out her joints; repeatedly leaning to one side of the spinning clay to shape and sculpt it would have developed the muscles on that side of her body, the researchers reported at a May conference on Crete.

Ceramics Champion Ronald Kuchta Passes at 85

A former director of the Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse NY, Ronald Kuchta, has passed away at 85. Kuchta arrived at the Everson in 1974 after serving as the curator of the Chrysler Museum, and as director of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. Shortly after his arrival, Kuchta hired Syracuse University professor, Margie Hughto, as the Museum’s first dedicated Curator of Ceramics. 

Kuchta and Hughto conspired for the Everson to continue its work with ceramics in the wake of the 1972 cancellation of the Ceramic National exhibitions by his predecessor. They invited nationally-recognized painters and sculptors to Syracuse to produce ceramic works with Syracuse University. Hughto converted a disused can factory into a modern studio, staffed with a small army of students and volunteers who assisted such artists as Helen Frankenthaler, Larry Poons, Billy Al Bengston, and Anthony Caro. Their efforts were showcased in the 1976 exhibition New Works in Clay, which spawned follow-up exhibitions in 1978 and 1981. 

Kuchta and Hughto partnered with a young Garth Clark to launch A Century of Ceramics in the United States 1878-1978, still the USA’s modern ceramics’ only true blockbuster touring exhibition, which spawned a successful book, as well as a documentary on American ceramics narrated by Orson Welles. Century toured extensively and brought much-needed critical and scholarly attention to the field. In reviewing the exhibition for Art in America, critic Donald Kuspit wrote that “an exhibition devoted to the history of American pottery debunks the notion that ceramics is a populist craft with no high-art aspirations. It also suggests that, because ceramic art emphasizes both sight and touch, it may in fact be the quintessentially modernist art form.”

After retiring and moving to New York City in 1995, Kuchta’s commitment to ceramics continued. He joined Harry Dennis as the co-publisher of American Ceramics Magazine, which combined stunning photography and graphic design with critical reviews, essays, and interviews with leading figures in the field. He served on the board of the Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts in Maine, the Longhouse Reserve in East Hampton, and many other nonprofits throughout his storied career. 

Read the full obituary on the Everson Museum of Art blog.

Officine Saffi announces the 45 finalists from over 600 candidates

Officine Saffi has announced the 45 finalists of the fourth edition of the Officine Saffi award, selected from over 600 candidates in 53 countries. The competition, founded in 2013, is a biennial event that aims to discover, support and promote artists who choose to express themselves through the medium of ceramics.

The panel of experts has selected a very heterogeneous shortlist. Its members include Glenn Adamson, curator, Garth Clark, editor-in-chief of Cfile, Annalisa Rosso, co-founder of Mr. Lawrence, Matt Wedel, artist, Elisa Ossino, architect and interior designer, Jill Singer and Monica Khemsurov, Editors-in-chief of Sight Unseen, Isabelle Naef Galuba, director of the Musée Ariana and Laura Borghi, founder of Officine Saffi. Installations, objects, sculptures and research projects will be exhibited together in an open display.

Gunilla Maria Åkesson (1963, Sweden), Anton Alvarez (1980, Sweden), Eyvind Solli Andreassen (1986, Norway), Salvatore Arancio (1974, Italy), Francesco Ardini (1986, Italy), Audrey Ballacchino (1986, France), Chiara Camoni (1974, Italy), David Casini (1973, Italy), Rino Claessens (1994, The Netherlands), Phoebe Cummings (1981, UK), Formabesta (1965-68, Spain), Jennifer Forsberg (1970, Sweden), Elly Glossop (1982, Scotland), Annelie Grimwade Olofsson (1991, Sweden), Michele Guido (1976, Italy), Jessica Harrison (1982, UK), Marianne Huotari (1986, Finland), Julia Huteau (1982, France), Qwist Joseph (1987, USA), Jonathan Keep (1958, UK), Maria Kristofersson (1956, Sweden), Jeongwon Lee (1985, South Korea), Virginia Leonard (1965, New Zealand), Claire Lindner (1982, France), Carlo Lorenzetti (1990, USA), Icaro Maiterena (1978, Spain), Ian McDonald (1975, USA), Domenico Mangano & Marieke Van Rooy (1974-76, IT-NL), Caterina Morigi (1991, Italy), Monika Patuszyńska (1973, Poland), Gregorio Peño Velasco (1983, Spain), Héloïse Piraud (1988, France), Andrea Sala (1976, Italy), Catherine Sanke (1990, Germany), Francesco Simeti (1968, Italy), John Souter (1989, USA), Akiko Taniguchi (1978, Japan), Tellurico (1985, Italy), Iren Tete (1990, USA), Liya Wan (1963, China).

Seth Rogen Favors Pot and Pots

Seth Rogen claims that his kiln products have a “a sort of Ken Price-ish effect.” It may be presumptuous for the superstar and hobbyist potter to evoke the name of America’s great modern master of the medium, Ken Price, but he is now the poster boy for both pot and pots. He does both through his commercial marijuana venture, Houseplant, and his ceramic vessels the company sells. 

In a recent New York Times article, the arrival of his first commercial foray into ceramics was announced, marketing a pair of objects; a bud vase (yes, we get the pun) and an ashtray for doobie fans. Made in China from his designs, they are presented in a lavish box. As a design project the set is modestly handsome and unpretentious, putting forth a 1950’s Mid-Century-Modern, Scandinavian stoneware aesthetic in line with the midcentury designer furniture by Hans Wegner and others that he collects to furnish his home. 

In an interview with Annie Armstrong, “Seth Rogen Has a New Pot Habit”, in the The Cut,  Rogen explains why ceramics got his attention: 

There’s something about how you’re literally trying to center something. [Laughs.] The metaphors abound. But there’s inherently something meditative about it. I do like tactile things; I like to produce tangible work. With movies, we spend years on them and then they’re very intangible. They don’t have weight, they don’t occupy a physical space. You used to at least get a DVD or a Blu-Ray, and you don’t even really get that anymore. I don’t like to keep my own movie posters around because those are just advertising for the product, not the product itself. I do really like being able to create an artistic expression that is a thing that I can pick up, hold, show to people. It is just so different from what I normally do which has no mass to it.

Unlike his muted but richly mottled palette for the ashtray and vase, Rogen clearly enjoys glazing and with his unique pieces his surfaces have energy which his form has yet to match (but he is getting there). He employs a variant of Price’s work:

His process is honestly somewhat mysterious, and I don’t think there’s documentation of him achieving the effects. But from my understanding, he used up to 75 layers of what I think was car paint. Then he somehow stripped away layers of it in a method that is truly bewildering. Especially if you yourself have tried to strip away layers of paint from a ceramic piece. The way that effect is achieved is truly beyond my understanding.

Too much fuss about too little art? Again, it’s about him being a hobbyist albeit with a giant audience. He does not sell his handmade works, nor hold shows, just gifts and swaps work.  When the New York Times article appeared, it was linked to a photograph of some pots on his Instagram account. Within a few days there were 778,000 views. That is beneficial in raising clay awareness and the work is simply unapologetic fun. 

Speak Pottery to the World, Bray seeks a Communications Director

The Archie Bray Foundation seeks a full‐time Communications Director to manage and strengthen the organization’s ongoing communications efforts. Reporting to the Resident Artist Director, this professional should have an established background in directing and managing a multi‐channel communications strategy. Nonprofit work experience is preferred. The Bray is an equal opportunity employer and celebrates diversity. Women, LGBTQ+ and persons of color are encouraged to apply.

The Archie Bray Foundation for the Ceramic Arts (Bray) is an internationally recognized arts organization located in Helena, Montana. Founded in 1951, the Bray is a public, nonprofit organization dedicated to the enrichment of the ceramic arts offering artist residencies, public exhibitions, ceramic supplies, and educational workshops and community classes for adults and children. The Bray’s facilities include year round and seasonal artist studios, education and research facility, sales gallery, rotating exhibition spaces, kiln facilities, administrative offices and a retail ceramic supply operation. The Bray recently completed a $6 million capital campaign for a new education center (2017), renovated administrative offices (2018) and new sales, exhibition and history galleries (2021).

The Archie Bray Foundation is actively committed to promoting, celebrating, and sustaining the ceramic arts through the residency program, education, gallery, ceramic materials and technology, and community engagement on a local, national, and international scale. In the words of Archie himself, the Bray makes available, “for all who are seriously and sincerely interested in any of the branches of the ceramic arts, a fine place to work”.

Salary range is $47,000 to $52,000 per year. Awarded salary will be commensurate with qualifications and experience. Early submissions are encouraged. Applications will be reviewed beginning March 5, 2021. This position will remain open until filled. Interested candidates should follow this link to our application portal on Slideroom.com. General questions may be addressed to brad@archiebray.org or Archie Bray Foundation, 2915 Country Club Ave., Helena, MT, 59602. No phone calls, please.

3150 B.C. Egyptian Brewery with 320 Earthenware Vats

Archaeologists from Egypt and the United States have found a 5,000-year-old high production brewery at a funerary site in North Abydos from the time of King Narmer, who ruled ancient Egypt around 3150 B.C. It houses eight large areas for beer production, each containing about 40 earthenware pots arranged in rows. Workers would have heated grains and water in the vats, which were held in place by clay levers. That’s enough to give every person in a 40,000-seat sports stadium a pint. Perhaps the world’s earliest example of truly industrial-scale beer production.”

Evidence found at the archaeological site—located in the southern Egyptian city of Sohag—suggests that the beer was used in sacrificial rites. The brewery “may have been built specifically to supply the royal rituals that were taking place inside the funeral facilities of the kings of Egypt,” says joint expedition leader Matthew Adams.  

But ritual may not be the purpose. A 5,000-year-old tablet found in the city of Uruk in modern-day Iraq could help to explain what kept its inhabitants happily living together for so long – they were paid in beer. In what is thought to be one of the oldest pay slips discovered, the cuneiform depicted a human head eating from a bowl, meaning ‘ration’ also noting how many bowls were consumed. The final image of dusty beer bottles is not period in case you are confused, and added for your amusement.

Nir Hod Peddles Loneliness in a Set of Four Porcelain Dessert Plates

At Artware Nir Hod offers a set of four seven-inch-diameter dessert plates that are priced at $120, stunning graphically and exquisitely packaged. For the right recipient this could make a radical chic gift served with a dose of desertion and desperation. The approved list of those who would appreciate the set is defined more by exclusion, those who are not right, with those recovering from substance abuse being at the top of that list. But we like them, a lot, and renaming them Addicted to White Gold could give the platters a whole new market of those who are porcelain addicted.

The plates are inspired by Nor’s famous series of oil-on-mirror paintings, The Night You Left, that for the artist captures a heightened and ephemeral emotional state, a meditation on love and love lost, on pain and catharsis. “There is a certain magic in loneliness,” Hod explains, “you have to be alone to create,” adding, “It’s not about drugs or glamour—it’s about the inside world, where you can dream and love and seek a greater truth—it’s about a feeling of being connected to something so human.”

You will be pleased to know that they dishwasher safe. And one can obtain a matching set of coasters reclining on black velvet, packaged with the same dark elegance, for $95

Brooklyn’s Vessel Closes after Third Suicide 

New York–Curbed reports that on January 11, a young man ended his life by jumping off the Vessel, the freestanding observation structure in the middle of Manhattan’s Hudson Yards. It’s the site’s third suicide in less than a year. The Vessel is currently closed to visitors pending a safety review. The writer explains: 

A shuttered Vessel is not an outcome I could have envisioned at the extravagant multimedia design unveiling I attended five years ago. On that day, Related Companies, the developer of Hudson Yards, played a video of Alvin Ailey dancers performing for hundreds of spectators on a mock-up of the Vessel’s signature staircases. In an address to the crowd, Mayor Bill de Blasio jokingly warned Vessel designer Thomas Heatherwick, a Londoner, that 100 New Yorkers would have 100 different opinions on the project.

If and when the Vessel reopens it will be facing a barrage of disability claims and has already. The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York entered into an agreement with Related that required the developer to install a lift that stops on more floors. The question is whether anything can be built in New York in the future that does not give equal access to the disabled. It’s an exceptional structure, as one climbs an Escher effect that keeps expanding but between wheelchair issues (for a giant staircase, elevators might satisfy that) and the unfortunate magnet it is for those considering suicide, its days as a working space my be numbered. 

However, I am betting money on the developer Related and Stephen Ross (he is Related’s chairman and this venture is his pet project) and British designer, Thomas Heatherwick’s genius. They can reach an imaginative solution for all to enjoy the Vessel in some way, this elaborate honeycomb-like structure that rises 16 stories and consists of 154 flights of stairs, 2,500 steps, and 80 landings for visitors to climb, adding more viewpoints for the disabled and making design changes to render suicides near impossible to enact. Learn more about Vessel in Cfile.

The post Seth Rogen’s Smoking Pots, a 3,000-Year-old Potter and a 5,000-Year-old Brewery. appeared first on CFile - Contemporary Ceramic Art + Design.

Their appearance in this auction causes a moment to reconsider her standing. Her art has been off the scene for long enough that her two animals here have the shock of the almost-new. And the experience, for this writer at least, is surprisingly positive.

They have a Koonsian quality (think of his porcelain Banality series that was launched in 1988 just after Stewart’s works were made). Now their obsessive craft has a newly revealed laconic, ironic and iconic edge. They look back at the viewer with a cockiness, daring one to question their exquisite silky handling of materials and a deft perfection in painting.

I have come away from this encounter greatly impressed. Alas, a great opportunity to acquire the works, with reasonable estimates and rare appearance in the market, was lost when both lots were passed.

In the essay on Stewart by Helen Drutt for the exhibition catalog, she rightly locates it as having “few parallels within contemporary American ceramics. Her sculptural tableaus are episodic, enigmatic, and elusive, and they are executed with meticulous precision endowed with haunting elegance”.

A possible exception is the work of Jack Earl but his ceramic dogs, despite their obvious sophistication, remain leashed to a folk art proposition. Stewart on the other hand tells us that her pets are to the manor born. They reveal a level of manual perfection that is innately costly in time to achieve.

Drutt adds further insights into these two works:

Standing Cat (1983-84) and Dog with Bones (1986) are exemplary of Stewart’s protracted exploration of these domesticated animals set in different familiar yet decontextualized poses or situations. Their patinas are intentionally rendered to look like linoleum, emphasizing a domesticated realism set apart from her earlier practice of fantastic realism.

Standing Cat is among the rare examples that have no additional elements, such as a reptile or bird, to drive the work’s narrative. Instead, the animal is shown with its gaze fixated on something we can’t see, leaving the viewer to imagine the rest of the composition. Dog with Bones shows the creature not with a cliché chew toy or meat shank; rather, the bones are splintered and belong to an animal larger than the dog, suggesting an act of predatory violence.

The work on this auction by Voulkos was strangely pale (compared to the striking group offered a year ago) and lacked his usual forcefulness. The real excitement came from Betty Woodman and Toshiko Takaezu and their powerful and exceptional pieces that fetched respectable prices and proves their resilience.

As before Michael Lucero’s prices were embarrassing. He is a good artist and his visual wit has rarely been more pronounced than with Untitled for the Afro-Italian Series, a 2011 play on African antiquities, made in Postmodernism’s most promiscuous period of appropriation, dangerous ground to play with today.  But Lucero neutralizes outrage. Instead of traditional grass and animal, the skirt is made up of knotted ties that suggest the closet of a white businessman.  While not quite Gordian this work’s reverse gaze has a delicious complexity and deserved to fetch more than the paltry hammer price of $2,600 for this five-foot-tall work.

Lastly, the ‘small is beautiful’ trend (scroll to the bottom) with Lucie Rie continues in Phillips Online Design Auction (February 10, 2021) otherwise this was a lackluster sale for ceramics. These tiny pieces now get much more per centimeter than larger more imposing works. This began with a surging prices for her chawan and yunomi tea bowl sized forms and have continued down into Lilliput-land.

In case you are confused with the use of the Japanese terms for the tea drinking vessel definitions.net offers an answer: a yunomi is a form of teacup, typically made from a ceramic material, being taller than wide, with a trimmed or turned foot. Unlike the more formal chawan tea bowl, which is used during the Japanese tea ceremony, the yunomi is made for daily tea drinking.

Overall, auctions are now sorting out the resale market for modern and contemporary ceramics. There is more predictability in hammer price and the market is also deciding which of the past ceramic stars will have a secondary market. As this process works, that list becomes ever smaller, and, on a positive note, more demanding aesthetically.

The post Pots, Puppies and Kitties: A Short Story about Rago Auctions appeared first on CFile - Contemporary Ceramic Art + Design.