Ceramics

Takeuzu’s ceramics explore closed cylindrical or spherical vessels, so called “moons” that explore the interior and exterior surface and form poetic mirrored relationships to the body — often resembling or closely inferring the heart or soul-as-organ, and particularly reinforced by the inclusion of a small bead of clay wrapped in paper before sealing to rattle around in the interior space. This jar is sealed a slightly squat form, its surface treated for a depth of texture in firing — then finished with a cobalt glaze.

Smith's work is remarkable in his technique as well as the gravity based forms. Using earthenware, those most common of clays, Smith refines their surfaces to an elegant smoothness that defies the eye and is sensual to the touch. His play with space within the vessels is unlike any other artist and the use of a metallic leaf accentuates the glowing interiors.

The semi-mythic creations of Thompson find a language in shared, decentralised symbolism — exploring identity as thrown onto objects by artist or viewer, or insinuated in coincidental action or operation. ‘Wapiti’ is a sculpture of particularly vivid and monstrous proportion, the artist utilising a combination of hand-build elements and new and existing moulds to build his ceramics — the practice extending the unconscious state in which results are arrived at. In opposition to later, more muted or metallic palettes, the work is finished with a vibrancy and naturalism applied in a full spectrum of airbrushed acrylic paint, and the overall scale and detail of the hybrid female/deer aspect is readily conducive of religious or pagan deities.

Gallaspy’s ceramics have an alien purpose — ‘What Goes Up’s strange elemental form seeming to have melted and be growing; the delicately patterned skin of the vessel coated in a primordial ooze that speaks truly of clay as a viscous, erratic material. Searching branchlike geometric webs picked out in ink defy and fight the instability, and an interesting combination of 2 and 3d elements begins to form. The thicker strains of a web morphing into actuality in a skeletal framework of delicate tubular ceramic. In her practice Gallaspy seeks to find an interactive space between the existent and the unknown, utilising chance and accident to find stimulating result.

Reflecting the co-existence of chaos and beauty in nature, Zemer Peled’s form remarks on a sense of place and movement that feels simultaneously delicate and violent. Each shard is made by rolling out large sheets of clay which are glazed, fired — then smashed with a hammer to create fragments holding a vestige of material fragility and edged with a new razor-sharp sense of that point of destruction, and the hint of further menace that the barbs of a land or sea creature might imply. Construction of porcelain shards

Political commentary is more often the cartoonist’s mechanism, but Dixon has found earthenware his mode for outpourings of wicked, occasionally acidic, societal criticism. Kitschy vessels play out a drama upon their surface, and here ‘Whore of the World’ offers a particularly expressive example — its design as close to grotesque cake decoration or Aardman model as sculpture. The female figure, restlessly symbolic of royalty, liberty and Western civilisation at large, seems to be enjoying herself amongst her small carnival and corgis — but the creeping inquiry of the artist seems to, “at what cost?”

Fairytales loom in Consentino’s sculpture, the dark and childlike stories emerging through figurative ceramics that play with metaphor and association. the ‘Wolf Rabbit Girl’ diptych trades body parts to create hybrids, the artist exploring and subverting the notions of gender constructed in these stories for children. The figure with the wolfs head suggests some retroactive continuity of popular folk tales, the fusion subsuming stereotype to present confident and playful postures — and discovering the underlying psychological motifs previously hidden. The forms are stoneware, crafted by hand then coloured with oil and glazes.

Judy Fox’s highly sexualised sea creatures explore the conception of gender and the rise of body issues from a psychological and sometimes uncomfortable angle, framing and questioning human imperatives as they jostle in context with the Cephalopodic form. A sense of hyper-reality, or real versus a new disarming fantasy, finds itself in Fox’s striking use of gradated colour — the artist building plush hues that seem almost chromatic with a casein paint, layered and masked.

Beginning with standard, symmetrical thrown pots, Anne Marie Laurels slowly pulls, stretches and deforms the still-wet clay to a new, unique and semi-spontaneous shape. The lustrous physicality of the vessel reveals the movement of the artists hand and the fluency and overall plasticity of the base material in a flesh-like tonality, built in a gradient of matte glazes. Belgian clay thrown on the wheel, altered and assembled clayglazes

Xie Dong only sought to work in porcelain after noticing the beauty in the wrinkles and folds of a tinfoil chocolate bar wrapper, translating those ephemeral qualities to ceramic — a more permanent but naturally fragile and delicate looking cross-medium. The use of Bone China, made locally, means the china retains a translucent, ivory-coloured quality once fired, and these ‘Zhezhou’ or ‘Wrinkle’ cups intentionally impress the texture, creases and elusive dynamics inherent in tinfoil.

The Pre-Columbian figures have a special place in Lucero’s oeuvre, bringing out the full range of his palette and sculptural inventiveness. The figure’s hair is an homage to the ruffled pots of the eccentric 19th-20th century Biloxi potter, George E. Ohr. Reference: Exhibited on the Michael Lucero Sculpture 1976-1995, organized by the Mint Museum of Art, Charlotte, NC and traveled to various venues between 1996 and 1998. This work has two full page illustrations in the accompanying book as well as the cover images front and back, Barbara J Bloemink and Mark Richard Leach (with essay by Lucy R. Lippard) Michael Lucero Sculpture 1976-1995, New York: Hudson Hills Press, 1996.