Chris Longwell

Three Porcelain Bowls

Blue Celadon Reduction Fired, 2400°F 2023

My strongest influences have predominantly come from the natural world. Some of my glazes are formulated to flow in the kiln and move over, around, and collect in the textures. I liken this to the way water moves in a stream around rocks and undulations. The speckles in the glaze come from sand collected from the beaches of Alaska’s Cook Inlet. The brown sand gets its darker color from heavy minerals derived from glaciers both present and extinct. Iron bits in the sand stain the clay and bleed into the glaze when it becomes fluid during the firing. The textured surface of two of these bowls comes from a stamp I created from a fossil I found along the Chemung River. I pressed the stamp against the wet surface of the clay to create the texture. The fossil and the stamp are displayed on the pedestal along with the bowls.

Please feel free to pick up these bowls and my other functional works. I want your experience to be both visual and tactile.

Jan Kather

“...my subject is drawn from the history of the past, wherein we see how nations have risen from the Savage state to that of Power & Glory & then fallen & become extinct...”

Thomas Cole, in a letter to his patron Luman Reed, about the idea for his first large-scale allegorical series The Course of Empire, 1833-36. Oil on canvas, The New-York Historical Society.

Two hundred years ago artists such as Thomas Cole were sounding the alarm about the imminent destruction humans were bequeathing to future civilizations. Little did Cole know his prediction about the human desire to harness and control nature would result in what we know today as Climate Change.

The artwork I present in this show runs the gamut from poster, to puzzle, to the embroidered cyanotype wall hanging, to video. The “Periodic Table” metal print is recycled, i.e., being exhibited with a new perspective. In 2015 James Randall quizzed me when I exhibited the piece. “Jan, do you know how outdated the periodic table in your artwork is?” His question foreshadowed my current thoughts about Climate Change: our thinking as a society is outdated. New strategies of saving the earth, as we know it, must be implemented.

Communicating about Climate Change is often met with indifference. No one wants to be told that their way of life must change, especially those who are “well off.” I take inspiration from Daniel Quinn’s 1995 novel Ishmael when the main character, a gorilla, advises his pupil:

“…people need more than to be scolded, more than to be made to feel stupid and guilty. They need more than a vision of doom. They need a vision of the world and of themselves that inspires them.”

Ishmael by Daniel Quinn, New York: Bantam Books, 1992 p243-244

The pieces I am exhibiting acknowledge that although we are grieving over a perceived loss of our way of life, we can’t afford to succumb to this negativity. How do we do that? The message becomes more optimistic if we see that the solution is to change our way of thinking, or our unspoken “mythology of being.”

We can list actions to promote the sustainability of our planet, but it starts with the change in the way we see ourselves in this world. Ishmael suggests that the problem is the BELIEF that the world belongs to man rather than man belongs to the world.

Can we revision ourselves as belonging to the world? Let the conversation begin.