Robert Harrison: Celestial Alignments

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aqueducts. The works of contemporary earth artists (Andy Goldsworthy, Nancy Holt, Richard Long) grew increasingly important to his approach, as did the eccentric structures built

by Barcelona visionary Antonio Gaudi. Harrison's eclectic tastes were to lead him far from his pottery roots and halfway back again.

When he entered the University of Denver's graduate program in ceramics in 1979, Harrison was ready to step outside the tradition of vessel making and to begin to explore other possibilities in his ceramic work. Today, Harrison sees his move from pottery to sculpture as a natural evolution, but at the time, he recalls, it was difficult, even painful. "I've always loved clay as a material, and Ilove the traditional forms," he says. "When I first began making sculpture, especially when I incorporated non-ceramic objects, it felt as if I was somehow betraying my family." His sense of loyalty, however, couldn't still his exploratory urge, and his artistic excursions have led him to use, besides raw clay and fired ceramic artifacts (manufactured bricks, shards from other artists' pots, commercial vases, teacups, and tiles), such disparate materials as galvanized culvert pipe, granite capitals from discarded columns and other architectural fragments, red volcanic rock, wooden beams and poles, Styrofoam, concrete, and aluminumwrapped television cable.

At the same time, Harrison retains his allegiance to ceramics. He currently serves as president of the board of directors for the Archie Bray Foundation for the Ceramic Arts, and he is a past board member for the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts [NCECA]. Some of his most recent worksespecially his miniature stack forms, seen in this exhibitionare all clay, a return to roots, however temporary, that delights and surprises him.

ALIGNING

THE STARS

Harrison finds himself drawn to spiritually resonant sites and spaces, and his gallery installations echo and honor the cathedrals, ruins of Roman temples, and Celtic megaliths he visits during frequent European travels. His installations, which manipulate space in powerful ways, might be called the reliquaries of a private religion, and the relics they

yellow striped arch; they are, perhaps, models for past or future large-scale siteworks, but at the same time, on their own relatively diminutive terms, they command attention.

CONVERSING WITH A SITE: ARCHES AND STACKS

Cullumned Spiral, 1989, Kohler, Wisconsin

contain-despite their undeniably personal nature-somehow speak eloquently to many who visit them. Like a handful of other contemporary ceramic artists-interestingly, this group includes Bobby Silverman, Louis Katz, Rebecca Hutchinson, Richard Swanson, and Richard Notkin, all of whom live at least part-time in Harrison's current hometown, HelenaHarrison has made the installation an integral part of his work.

During the past twenty years, his installations have been featured at Alberta College of Art Gallery, Calgary; the Banff Centre School of Fine Arts, Alberta; Holter Museum of Art, Helena' and the University of South Australia Art Museum, Adelaide. An early installation, his Four-X Transposed, was featured in Gonzaga's Ad Gallery in 1982, while he was an assistant professor at the school and head of the ceramics program.

Certainly, the centerpiece and center point to his current Gonzaga exhibition Celestial Alignments represents the culmination of this aspect of Harrison's work. Incorporating his usual mix of materials, surrounded by four spiraling wooden columns and dramatically lit from above, the central "stack"-at nine and a half feet tall-stretches to the heavens.

The stack, with its ziggurat crown of cut steel, is constructed of culvert pipe and enshrouded in galvanized wire fencing.

The shroud, in turn, is wrapped with television cable sheathed in pliable aluminum and filled with multi-colored shards of locally manufactured tile, a tribute to ceramics and to hardworking western farmers who pile rocks in the comers of their stony fields.

To enter this sacred space, you must pass down a narrow corridor (birth canal, passageway to a burial chamber) and through Celestial Archway, a Styrofoam arch that alludes in its decoration to Van Gogh's Starry Night and in its form to the weightier, earth-bound arches Harrison has erected across North America and in Australia and Europe. In this exhibition, see also his miniature arches and the five-foot-tall, black-and-

In 1980, while working at the Omaha Brickworks, Harrison created his first sitespecific sculpture, carving an "X" into a clay hillside at the brickworks. He was fascinated by the notion that the Nebraska weather would be his collaborator, each storm subtly or violently altering his handiwork, but at the same time he began to consider the possibility of constructing something more permanent: a shrine, an instant ruin, a provocative folly.

Another old brickyard would offer Harrison his first opportunity to leave just such a permanent mark. Between 1983 and 1985, Harrison spent his time working at the renowned Archie Bray Foundation, formerly the Western Clay Manufacturing Company, on the outskirts of Helena. There he found plentiful space, materials for the asking, and institutional, financial, and moral support for new, more ambitious works.

Harrison built his first semi-permanent piece-entitled TileX-on the grounds of the Bray brickyard in 1984. He had earlier created another hillside "X"-Montana X-on a piece of property belonging to Robert "Irish" Flynn, a University of Manitoba professor of ceramics and Archie Bray alumnus who has recently retired to Helena. A pyramid-like structure built of discarded ceramic drain tile manufactured at the Bray brickyard and bound together with metal strapping, Tile-X is situated on a north-south axis, extends twenty-five feet along each axis, and stands twenty-two feet high. Tile-X is tall and broad enough to

Red River Passage, 1995, Winnipeg, Manitoba

compete visually with the brickyard buildings nearby, and it echoes-in abstract form-the brooding face of Mount Helena directly to the south.

Tile-X was a breakthrough piece for Harrison; by its very size and scale it gave him the confidence to attempt still larger projects, to hone his construction skills, to indulge his fantasies. One of Harrison's dreams was to build a monument to the potters and ceramic sculptors who were his comrades at the Bray, and in the spring of 1985 he began to construct A Potter's Shrine.

As a clear turning point in Harrison's work, A Potter's Shrine presented a number of daunting challenges. He was incorporating new forms (the shrine's brickwork floor was to be a Celtic cross-a kind of "X" -placed within a circle). He had to learn the art oflaying bricks, not just for the complex floor, which features the cross set in a herringbone pattern, but for the walls and archways as well. And he had to overcome many logistical difficulties, foremost among them, the unpredictable Montana weather and a chronic shortage of time to devote to the project.

Despite the obstacles, Harrison brought his project brilliantly to completion. Both social and spiritual space, A Potter's Shrine truly resonates with its site. In its brickwork, it echoes the original studio buildings built in the early 1950s by Rudy Autio, Peter Voulkos, and other Bray pioneers, and it mimics-in its circular form and acoustical qualities-the brickyard's crumbling, but elegant beehive kilns, constructed before 1916. As unofficial curator of the shrine, Harrison asked Bray residents to contribute to what he saw more and more as a collaboration, and many Bray residentspast and present-have complied, placing imperfect examples of their works on the shrine's walls, ledges, benches, and floor. Finally, the Bray's board asked Harrison to place Rudy Autio's bust of Archie Bray, founder of the foundation and its guardian angel, within the shrine. Deeply honored by the request, Harrison placed the bust, sculpted by Autio in the early 1950s, facing west, "at eye level in a position where he could oversee 'future developments."

Since that beginning in the mid-1980s, Robert Harrison has created nearly thirty site-specific works. A 1988 work, also at the Bray, established Harrison's emerging vocabulary.

EntitledAruina, this row of five unruly brick columns stands at the northwestern corner of the Bray grounds. Connected by tile-and-brick covered arches, the columns of Aruina frame the nearby Scratchgravel Hills and, with considerable wit, play with the conventions of classical architecture. Aruina is made up of modern industrial materials-concrete, stout cardboard tubes (the interior architecture of the columns themselves), and bricks from the adjoining brickyard. Shards from discarded polychrome sculptures by Japanese artist

Michio Sugiyama---embedded in the spiraling patterns of brickwork-add touches of energy and color.

With Aruina as starting place, Harrison began to elaborate and improvise. He created other colonnades; his Cullumned Spiral, 1989, at the Kohler Sculpture Park in Wisconsin and Black Mountain Colonnade, 1994, on his own property are prime examples. He turned increasingly to a simplified vocabulary: the arch, the column, and the buttress.

In 1995, at his alma mater, the University of Manitoba, Harrison and a group of students fashioned a work-Red River Passage-that marked, in his view, the epitome of his efforts to "mix and match shapes, textures, and colors." In this work, by some species of alchemy, Harrison has brought together seamlessly, while retaining a pleasurable tension, an arch cast of stabilized adobe and covered with tiles, a brick column, and a curving buttress (almost a wall) of galvanized metal.

Perhaps it is the paved area, set with manufactured cobblestone "bricks," that unites the work-and gives it its social dimension, allowing visitors a zone of peace, a place for meditation or repose.

Other particularly significant Harrison archways completed in the last decade include Penland Arch, 1994, Penland School, North Carolina and Medaltarch, 1999, Medalta International Artists in Residence Program for the Ceramic Arts, Medicine Hat, Alberta. Unlike the siteworks Harrison has built in the American West, where the landscape is austere (and Harrison responds with rich, saturated colors), Penland Arch is black and white, an elegant Yin/Yang symbol carved out of the vegetal chaos of a dense North Carolina forest. Medaliarch, too, contributes something new to Harrison's oeuvre: a tiny brick building with its own

one end of the arch, ans have dwelt here. ison to yet another te in the Creating the ference hosted by the , he spent eight days of work. Having almost exclusively, pect-challenge and ith wet brick clay. mode of carefully ing only one material materials, Harrison of the last decade, pleting the arch and 'ubiquitous British ory, designing and stack, based on the ys of Hampton Court , on the stack forms and David Shaner. , the most seminal ed Chimney Stacksin the coming year g the chimney form, stones and Roman r Harrison, a singular ity for infinite and gland, Harrison has n the Bray grounds d onsite); and during in Lancashire, Great project sponsored by mney stacks he calls ith wet brick clay, he ith a knife. As with n two parts-a broad, ul chimney. Harrison bottom out of his med the articulated er moving, Chimney ally, of Brancusi's ient traditions of nd lends a spirited g.

t its heart, Celestial acks, plus four stacks, tand four feet tall.

Harrison's oeuvre is "scarcely stilllifes." e collages of ceramic d leaf emerged out of

Harrison's experience as a resident at the Kohler Arts Center in Wisconsin. There, working with the Kohler porcelain clay body (intended for bathroom fixtures), he cast from his own molds pots, figures, and natural objects (leaves, shells) that he then shattered and reassembled, setting his shards into beds of plaster and containing them in found window frames.

Harrison soon began building custom frames, breaking his complex images into odd shapes. Referring to the histories of architecture, ceramics, painting, and sculpture, both western and eastern (witness such titles as Rococo Teacup Icon, The Three Graces: Chinese Memories, Tang Meets Yuan, and The Birth ofvenus DeMilo), these works fulfilled Harrison's desire to create small-scale, highly personal relics/ icons that might lend spirit to rooms and galleries. The high point, and most complex manifestation, of this body of work-and also included in this exhibition-is Broadwater Divider: Starry Night Revisited, a screen that giddily expresses, and meditates upon, Harrison's love affair with art history (and especially its celestial visionaries), as well as his delight in collage and the purely kitsch aspects of ceramics. Here, and elsewhere in these wall works, Harrison's early austerity and classical! modernist rigor have transmogrified into celebrations of vertiginous movement, glittering surface, and postmodern playfulness (see his Palladian Dream: Rococo Reality for a clear expression of this tension between the two strains in Harrison's sensibility).

Palladin Dream:Rococo Reality, 1991

AMBITION

AND EVOLUTION

Perhaps more than any other clay artist of his generation, Robert Harrison-following the lead of such mentors and heroes as Peter Voulkos and Rudy Autio-has skillfully and unselfconsciously brought trends from contemporary "fine" arts into the often-ghettoized "craft" of ceramics, successfully blurring and rendering meaningless such false distinctions. Celestial Alignments, a long-deserved retrospective of nearly thirty years' sustained work, brilliantly documents-and celebrates-the ongoing fecundity of Robert Harrison's imagination and his significant contribution to the health of ceramic arts today.

Rick Newby

Rick Newby is a poet, editor, and critic living in Helena, Montana.

ROBERT W. HARRISON EDUCATION

Master of Fine Art, Ceramics, University of Denver, 5/1981 Bachelor of Fine Art, Honors Ceramics, University of Manitoba, Canada, 5/1975

TEACHING APPOINTMENTS

University of South Australia, Visiting Scholar, Adelaide, South Australia, 7-10/1992 Lecture Tour of Australia, 10-1111992 The Banff Centre for the Arts, Acting Head, Ceramics Department, Alberta, Canada, 9/1988-5/1989 Lecture Tour of the British Isles, 1111987-1/1988 The Banff Centre for the Arts, Assistant Head, Ceramics Department, Alberta, Canada, 9/1985-87 Archie Bray Foundation, Ceramics Instructor, Helena, Montana, 1-5/1985 Gonzaga University, Spokane, Washington, Assistant Professor of Art, Ceramics, 9/1981-7/1983 University of Denver, Colorado, Graduate Teaching Assistant, Ceramics, 6-7/1980, 1-3/1981

AWARDS

Montana Arts Council: Individual Artist Fellowship, 6/1990 Manitoba Arts Council Grants: 9/1977, 79-80, 80-81 Canada Council Grant: 9/1977

RELATED EXPERIENCE

Board of Directors Appointment, Archie Bray Foundation, Helena, Montana, 1993-2002; President of the Board 1999-2001; Facilities Chair 1996-2001 Board of Directors Appointment, National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts (NCECA); Director-at-Large 1993-95; Publications Director 1995-98 NCECA International Slide Program Coordinator 1991-94

SELECTED ONE PERSON

EXHIBITIONS 1992-2001

SELECTED COLLECTIONS COMMISSIONS 1995-2000

Celestial Alignments, Jundt Art Museum, Gonzaga University, Spokane, Washington, 1-4/2001 .New Wallpieces, Bebe Kezar Western Eclectic Gallery, Whitefish, Montana, 6/1996 'New Wallpieces, Galerie Barbara Silverberg, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, 3-4/1993 Architecture Without Walls, Gallery Installation, University of Australia, Adelaide, Australia, 10/1992 Art and Architecture, Gallery Installation, Holter Museum of Art, Helena, Montana, 3/1992 Archie Bray Foundation for the Ceramic Arts Collection: Bray Stacks: Narley and Pearl, Helena, Montana, 2000 Rufford Craft Centre: Ironbridge Archway, Newark, otts, United Kingdom, 2000 Medalta International Artist-in-Residence Program Collection: Medaltarch, Medicine Hat, Alberta, Canada 1999 University of Dallas Collection: Constantin Arch, Dallas, Texas, 1998 City of Helena, Montana Public Art Commission: Queen City Gateway, Helena, Montana, 1997 City of Scottsdale Percent-for-Art Commission: Tournament Players Club Bridge, Scottsdale, Arizona, 1997 Kansas State University Collection: Tuttle Creek Archway, Manhattan, Kansas, 1996 Taunt Collection Commission: Zephrus Ignis Cratera, Helena, Montana, 1996 Georgia State University Collection: Atlannarch; Atlanta, Georgia, 1996 Mansfield Collection: Gulgong Square, Gulgong, NSW, Australia, 1995

PUBLICATIONS

Ceramic Review: The International Magazine of Ceramics (UK); Issue No. 184,7-8/2000.

Extruded Ceramics. Ashville, North Carolina: Lark Books, 2000.

Architectural Ceramics for the Studio Potter. Ashville, North Carolina: Lark Books, 1999.

Large-Scale Ceramics, Ceramics Handbook. London: A&C Black Publishers, 1997.

Ceramics: Art and Perception (Australia); Cover and Feature Article, Issue No. 10, 1992 Issue No.1, 1990.

Ceramics Monthly; 9/1995,111995, 12/1993,5/1992,411990,3/1986,3/1982.

American Ceramics Magazine, Issue 9/3, 1991.

WEBSITE

http://robert.harrison.net

Exhibit C~ra:for:J. Seotf~inode Design:~Bera:ldAlmanza:.lL~ Pnotographs: Courtesy oIthe artist 速Jundt JirtMuseum , GQnza,~a.~Ql!!versjtY1Sp~kan~, Washington, 99258-0001 EXHIBITION SPONSORED BY QUARRY TILE COMPANY