Continuum

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CON T I N U U M

K ate Blac kloc k

acknowlegements Special thanks to Betsy VanOot, Joyce Eldrige, Amanda Fiedler, Lisa Jacobson and Richard Turner

kate blacklock continuum: From 1989 – 2009 May 15th – June 15th, 2009 foster gallery The Noble & Greenough School 10 Campus Dr Dedham, MA 02026-4099 (781) 326-3700 All artworks © Kate Blacklock Catalog Design by Max Ackerman Printing & Binding by Acme Bookbinding ISBN 978-0-615-33792-0

CON T I N U U M 1989 – 2009

K ate Blac kloc k

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ESSAY B y C h r i st i n e Te m i n

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In a famous episode of Ovid’s “Metamorphoses,” the nymph Daphne is turned into a laurel tree in order to escape the amorous adventures of the god Apollo. In some of Kate Blacklock’s ceramic sculptures a woman is also being transformed by leaves, but she is not a young beauty like Daphne.

She is older. Her skin is speckled with age. Her neck sags. Her expression is defeated. She is being consumed by vegetation. For Daphne, becoming a tree was a release; for Blacklock’s women, encroaching nature spells death.

The Blacklock piece, aptly titled “Changes,” (p.13) was part of “Continuum,” a mid-career retrospective of 33 of the artist’s works held at the Foster Gallery of the Noble and Greenough School in Dedham, Massachusetts. The very word “Changes” describes Blacklock’s progress as well as this individual work. Her background is in ceramics, which she studied at the Rhode Island School of Design, where she now teaches.

She has been known as a ceramist, although her practice now includes photography and the combination of two dimensions and three in the same piece. She has also been categorized as a feminist artist, and while her subjects are all women, she is not of the in-your-face school of feminism.

She does not, however, shy away from sexual content in her work: “Golden Milkweed” (opposite) is a direct object scan, of a milkweed pod with a long slit down the middle and a hair-like

fluff at the top. It’s impossible not to see a vagina here. There is a whole school of flowers and plants as sexual symbols, of course, a school that includes such illustrious names as Georgia O’Keeffe and Robert Mapplethorpe. Blacklock also paints and photographs flowers, but, unlike some of O’Keeffe’s and Mapplethorpe’s, hers are generally not one-liners. Their petals curl and droop and look on the brink of expiring, speaking about death as much as about sex.

Her ceramic sculpture “Not a Swan Song” (p.14) also calls to mind the Greek myth of Leda and the Swan, who is actually Zeus masquerading as the bird with the serpentine neck in order to seduce Leda. The theme has been a favorite with artists from Leonardo to Cezanne.

Blacklock’s piece has four long necks moving in different directions, adding tension to the grace of the work.

The vanitas tradition of 17th century Dutch still life painting is a powerful presence in Blacklock’s art. Vanitas paintings are reminders of mortality expressed through objects used as symbols. The most blatant of them are skulls and extinguished candles. Many contemporary artists have picked up the theme. The flamboyant Young British Artist Damien Hirst made a skull of shiny cast silver, a material with a longevity that seems to contradict the mortality idea in vanitas. In the 1970s and ’80s Audrey Flack made still lifes that kept to the vanitas style and idea:

“The vanitas tradition of 17th century Dutch still life painting is a powerful presence in Blacklock’s art.”

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“Over the years Blacklock’s still lifes have become more complex in both subject and technique. Some are personal collections, seemingly random objects taken from her house and garden and arranged on a flatbed scanner.”

In addition to the candles, ripe fruit and other are essentially fictional, but they do obey the mainstay props of vanitas art, her paintings laws of gravity. Blacklock’s, by contrast, aren’t include lipstick and nail polish, standard indica- grounded. They exist in a dream-like haze, tors of female vanity. The Philadelphia Museum weightless, looking ready to float away from of Art has purchased “Strange Fruit,” an installa- each other. You don’t believe that her still lifes tion by the American artist Zoe Leonard that is will stay still, although Blacklock doesn’t treat composed of dried, empty fruit skins scattered this idea as literally as Gersht does. on the floor, an ode to the fleeting nature of life.

Over the years Blacklock’s still lifes have The Israeli artist Ori Gersht makes videos that become more complex in both subject and start out as innocuous looking still lifes of fruits technique. Some are personal collections, seemand flowers but end in violence, the subjects ingly random objects taken from her house blown to bits. and garden and arranged on a flatbed scanner.

Those 17th century masters were more subtle Writing about photography, the French phithan Hirst, Flack, Leonard, or Gersht. Jan losopher Roland Barthes makes a case for the Davidsz de Heem used piles of worn books medium as accurately capturing a past that may to signify the vanity of scholarship. De Heem no longer exist, which links it to death and to also painted ostentatious still lifes with fruits, the vanitas tradition. Despite the modern techlobsters and vessels of precious metals piled nology that produces Blacklock’s images, their high on carpet-covered tables. Blacklock’s still make-believe quality is connected in spirit to lifes seem more in tune with De Heem’s than Dutch vanitas paintings. with those of her contemporaries. Her takes on Among the casts of still life characters in the theme aren’t insistent or obvious. In some Blacklock’s sculptures, are fruits, flowers, trees, works Blacklock, like De Heem, heaps image classical architecture, Sevres porcelain, butter­ on top of image. In one of her direct object flies, orchids, disembodied hands, glass and scans, “Vanitas #1” (p.38), a dried up, puckered reflections. Blacklock’s reflections are a conlemon keeps company with flowers with brown- temporary kin to the mirrors in Jan Van Eyck’s ing, brittle petals, a glistening pearl necklace, a “The Arnolfini Wedding” and Velasquez’s “Las couple of drinking glasses, and other objects Meninas.” They complicate the scene, adding that, like those of De Heem, don’t seem to go layers to pieces that are alluring at a distance, together. In Dutch vanitas paintings, bouquets drawing you in to examine them at close range. of flowers that don’t bloom in the same season Some of the surfaces are crusty, as if covered

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with barnacles; or embossed, with doorways and window panes looking as if they were stamped into the piece’s skin; or bulging, as if the interiors of the shapes couldn’t quite contain their contents or their ideas.

Those surfaces act almost as film screens on which various images are projected. A blue glass vase painted onto a bust must bend to conform to the shape of the “screen.” Creeping towards the clay face in “Changes” are parts of a couple of other faces, these painted on. One is in stony shades of gray, with an eye slanted upward. It brings to mind Picasso’s Cubism, with the uptilted eye reminiscent of his iconic portrait of Gertrude Stein. Picasso fractured figures and then reassembled them in an order that alluded to many sources, art historical and others. Blacklock’s compositions do something similar. The multiple faces on her busts have a cinematic quality, like flashbacks, as if they stand for the porcelain figure’s various stages of life.

Another continuing theme in Blacklock’s work reflects her role in a significant and sophisticated movement in contemporary ceramics – figuration. The movement includes Viola Frey’s larger-than-life figures of individual men and women whose posture indicates their mood and their outlook on the world; and the part animal, part human, part plant figures of Jacqueline Hurlbert. In Blacklock’s case the figures are most often fragmentary. In a work called

“Leaf Veil” (opposite) a pair of disembodied hands hold a string of coral colored beads, like a rosary or worry beads. They add an elegiac touch. The leaves themselves cling to the facial features of the woman underneath, allowing the shape of those features to show through. The effect is like 19th century marble death masks where a virtuoso sculptor could make the folds of a veil so ethereal that both fabric and face were revealed.

The hands in “Leaf Veil” are an example of Blacklock’s isolation of body parts to give them mysterious meaning. In her “Teapot with Hands” (p.23) a sagging white vessel has, inexplicably, two handles. Two painted-on hands with fingers spread seem to be the only thing preventing the teapot from collapse. Here the hands symbolize power and energy, a bit like the outstretched hand of God meeting that of Adam in Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel. But Blacklock isn’t depicting the hand of God. She’s depicting a woozy, lopsided teapot – she rarely makes anything that is symmetrical - and that gives the piece a touch of comedy. The lack of balance also gives the piece a sense of movement, of being in progress. The disembodied hands that recur in her work are also reminiscent of the sculptures of female hands that were once a souvenir of the Grand Tour, or the powerfully elegant hands of Auguste Rodin. They may also be a stand-in for the artist herself and her ability to shape clay.

“Another continuing theme in Blacklock’s work reflects her role in a significant and sophisticated movement in contemporary ceramics – figuration.”

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“You can get an idea of some art, even some sculpture, from a single frontal view.

That’s impossible with Blacklock’s sculptures, which demand to be seen from the front, sides and back.”

Among Blacklock’s repertoire of figurative images is the face of Artemisia Gentileschi, the 17th century Roman painter who was one of the first women artists whose talent was recognized, and whose story – rape by a teacher, an obsession with female subjects including the Biblical heroine Judith – was the subject of a feature length film. Gentileschi’s most famous works all depict women. Blacklock, whose Artemisia face is based on the artist’s self-portrait, also limits her subjects to women (p.34). However, her treatment of her subjects is less straightforward and more oblique than that of artists comfortable with the label “feminist.” Her views of aging women are poignant rather than strident; they’re cousins to the portraits of Alice Neel.

As her use of teapots and tableware as motifs suggests, Blacklock is fascinated by the decorative arts. “Single Poppy” and “Rose with Marble” (pp. 18 & 19) may both be ultra chrome inks on aluminum, thoroughly modern media, but they’re surrounded by ornate gilded frames.

Those frames are a nod to the decorative arts of the past, as are the Sevres-inspired images on her works. In 1996 she had a residency at the fabled French porcelain manufacturer named for the Paris suburb where it relocated in 1756 at the behest of Louis XV. Painted images of Sevres vases turn up on several of Blacklock’s sculptures.

She tends to work in series. In addition to the busts there are tall vertical pieces. Twisting and listing, they could be interpreted as figures wearing swirling gowns, architecture (The Leaning Tower of Pisa?), twirling tornados, or, on a more mundane level, even towels being wrung dry. Some have the word “vessel” in the title, yet no one would use them to hold anything. They are the non-functional heirs of a traditional functional form. A particularly successful example is “Vessel with Sevres Pot,” where something that looks like a version of a famous winding exterior staircase in Venice twines around the piece as if holding it together.

The face of a Harlequin, wearing a ruff, is also painted on, as is unidentifiable vegetation. The painted Sevres pot seems a portal to another world. The sum total of the piece is hallucinatory, surreal.

You can get an idea of some art, even some sculpture, from a single frontal view. That’s impossible with Blacklock’s sculptures, which demand to be seen from the front, sides and back. You have to be in the presence of the real thing to form an idea of it; a photograph can’t do it justice. On the sides of “Changes,” for instance, are other faces, and on the back are falling leaves that give the piece an autumnal air. If I had to identify Blacklock’s work with a season, it would be Fall.

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“If I had to identify Blacklock’s work with a season, it would be Fall.”

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In some of her more experimental pieces, Blacklock’s work has, with increasing sophisBlacklock combines porcelain figures with paint- tication, applied themes from old masters to new ings on panel. She’ll use a black background, subjects and new media. In an art world in which another connection to Dutch painting, to set conceptual expansion has often outpaced artistic off two-dimensional flower imagery. It’s usually implementation, her use of traditional techjust one bloom rather than a bouquet, which niques and modern technology to capture the makes you focus on it as you would focus on vitality and mortality of women and the natural an individual’s face. In “White Tulip”(p.22) the and man-made objects that surround them has drooping blossom looks like it’s fighting for its created a unique and significant body of work. life. On a small shelf in front of the painting a supine female body lies in a similar pose. She’s naked and painted the blue of oxidized copper.

Underneath her is a puddle of red – blood. She hasn’t given up completely, though. Like the flower, she shows signs of resistance, with her hips lifted slightly off the floor and legs straining upward. In these works the flowers and figures seem to be holding a sympathetic conversation, with the flowers as beneficent guiding spirits.

Some of Blacklock’s works combining two and three dimensions are reminiscent of those of the Della Robbia family, active in Florence in the late Christine Temin was the art critic of The Boston 15th and early 16th centuries, artists who placed Globe for more than 20 years and now writes as a earthenware reliefs against painted grounds. In freelancer for various international publications. both cases, the results are theatrical – characters against a background.

Copyright © 2009 Christine Temin

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I look back over my work of the last twenty years and wonder if an outside eye might view this collection of objects as the work of five or six artists rather than one. They might ask themselves, what connects these separate bodies of work? Is this the work of a painter?

A sculptor? A photographer? Yet when I look, I see a very linear progression. An exploration of a limited number of themes or ideas examining how we are viewed by others in contrast to how we view ourselves.

As my personal experience of this has changed over the years, so have the visual manifestations. From earlier thoughts about sexual objectification to more current ideas about fading sexuality and beauty, portrayed in clay vessels and porcelain busts, combinations of painting and clay and most recently direct object scans printed on aluminum. Throughout, there are recurring

images of flowers and vegetation as metaphors for sexuality; of classical and decorative objects serving as signifiers of beauty; of hands holding on to precious or fragile objects, holding on or moving through time.   So am I a painter, a ceramicist, or photographer?

I am an artist on a journey. Sometimes there is a point where I become aware that I have a choice to continue down the familiar road, or take a detour, to change medium. I often find that I am searching for this turn. Perhaps the new road will take me through very different terrain. It may be a smooth scenic route or be rough and bumpy. Either way, the mere newness of a material offers challenges that excite and propel me and fuel my ideas. From this new road I might find another, which leads me back where I have been or in a new direction. Whatever route I take, I am here continually re-examining the accumulated miles of experiences and ideas. A continuum.

Kate Blacklock, May 2009

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kate blacklock Born: 1957, New York City, NY Education: MFA, Rhode Island School of Design

selected exhibitions

2009 2005 2004 2003 2002 2001 1997 1995 1991

solo Continuum; Photography, Painting and Sculpture, Foster Gallery, Dedham, MA The Figurative Gallery, La Quinta, California Life / Time, Residential College Art Gallery, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor Franklin Parrasch Gallery, New York City Holding On, Franklin Parrasch Gallery, New York City The Works Gallery, Philadelphia Porcelains From Sévres, Shaw Guido Gallery, Pontiac, Michigan Habatat Shaw Gallery, Pontiac, Michigan Schneider, Bluhm, Loeb Gallery, Chicago

group 2009 Didi Suydam Contemporary, Newport, RI 2008 Pacini Lubell Gallery, Seattle, WA 2007 Contemporary Ceramics, The Dairy Barn, Ohio University, and Athens, OH 2006 Cervini Haas Gallery, Scottsdale, AZ

Jane Sauer Gallery, Santa Fe, MN 2005 Spinning Tales, John Michael Kohler Art Center, and Sheboygan, WI

Vanitas, Lucy La Coste Gallery, Concord, MA 2004 Speaking Volumes, The Mint Museum, Charlotte, NC

Raw, Santa Fe Clay Center, Santa Fe, NM 2003 R.I.S.D. Faculty Biennial, R.I.S.D. Museum. Providence, RI

Art in Palm Beach, Franklin Parrasch Gallery 2002 The Sybaris Gallery, Royal Oak, Michigan

Kate Blacklock, Michael Crespo, Libby Johnson, James Watkins, Doug Peck Gallery, Providence, RI 2001 Five Fresh Voices, Franklin Parrasch Gallery, New York City

Containment: Recent Work by Dharma Strasser, Brad Schweiger and Kate Blacklock,

University of Texas, El Paso 2000 International Infusion, The Sybaris Gallery, and Royal Oak, Michigan 1999 The Spirit Show, Ann Connelly Gallery of Art, Baton Rouge, LA

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Nancy Margolis Gallery, New York City San Angelo National Ceramic Competition, San Angelo Museum, TX Survey Of Contemporary Clay Artists, Slidell Cultural Center, Slidell, and LA Virtualita Del Vaso, D’a Gallery, Vitorchiano, Milan & Sicily, Italy (Catalog) Fine Crafts Biennial, De Land Museum Of Art, Fl La Grange National, La Mar Dodd Art Center, Lagrange, GA Sculptural Objects and Functional Art (SOFA), Habatat/Shaw Gallery, Chicago After the Apple, Invitational Exhibition. South Suburban College, IL Orgamorphism, Foster Goldstrom Gallery, New York City 29th Ceramic National, The Everson Museum Of Art, Syracuse, NY

and The Newark Museum of Art, NJ (Catalog) American Ingenuity, Swidler Gallery, Royal Oak, MI Artistic Generations: J. Rice and Her Students, The Works Gallery, Philadelphia New Art Forms, Navy Pier, Chicago Mathematics Of The Heart, Ella Sharp Museum, Chicago (Catalog) Classicism Reconsidered, The Fuller Museum Of Art, Brocton, Mass.

Teapot Invitational, The Lee Sclar Gallery, NJ American Craft at the Armory, New York City Monarch Tile Ceramic Competition, Juried Exhibition, Texas (Catalog) Clay U.S.A., Radford College, Radford, VA (Catalog) The Art Of Craft, The Harcus Gallery, Boston On the Surface, Joan Robey Gallery, Denver, CO Providence Artists in Boston, Kingston Gallery, Boston The Works Gallery, Philadelphia New Artists, The Currier Gallery Of Art Manchester, NH (Catalog) Joan Robey Gallery, Denver A Singular Place, Santa Monica, CA Convergence Gallery, New York City Art ‘85, East Hanover, New Jersey Jackie Chalkley Gallery, Washington, D.C. Clay ‘84, Perkins Center for the Arts, NJ Convergence Gallery, New York City Cup Invitational, Martha Schneider Gallery, Chicago Swan Gallery, Philadelphia.

Art ‘83, Nabisco Brands Headquarters, NJ New York State, New Clay Talent, Clayworks, New York City Contemporary Artisans Gallery, San Francisco Yamato Gallery, Lenox, MA Accents And Images New York City

publications “500 Figures in Clay”, Lark Ceramic Books, 2004, pp. 52-53 “Flesh and Emotion”, by Mary K. Cloonan. Ceramics Art and Perception Vol 49 2002, pp. 41-44 “Human Histories: Recent Work by Kate Blacklock and Dharma Strasser”, by Kate Bonansinga.

Ceramics Monthly Magazine, January 2002, pp. 51-53 “Distorted Beauties: Ceramic work by Kate Blacklock”, by Conan Putnam. Ceramic Art & Perception.

Vol.41, Fall 2000 “Erotics & Aesthetics: Ceramics and Sexualities”, by Paul Mathieu. NCECA Journal, 1995 pp. 46-58 “Judgment Call”, American Craft Magazine, by Robert Ellison. Oct./ Nov. 1993 “Philadelphia Rolls out The Clay”, by Robert Ellison. American Craft Magazine, June/July 1992

public and private collections Sandy and Norman Mitchell, Washington, DC David and Clemmer Montague, Alexandria, VA Marc and Diane Grainer, Washington, DC Sandy Besser, Santa Fe, New Mexico Francis Lewis, New York City Jerome Shaw, Bloomfield Hills, MI Lynn Myers, South Pasadena, CA Musee Nationale De Ceramique, Sèvres, France The Mint Museum, Charlotte, NC

Foster Gallery is a teaching space. As an anchor of the Noble and Greenough School’s Arts Center, it provides a place to see, to discuss and to question art—for students, faculty, parents, and community residents alike. Although the vision for the Gallery remained consistent from its earliest conception through its construction and opening, the true impact of placing such a facility in the center of school life—a gallery not just for viewing art passively but for engaging art actively—is only beginning to resonate after its third year of operation. Exhibits such as Kate Blacklock’s Continuum, rich with texture and allusion, complex with personal history, and inspiring in its level of technical expertise, represent the kind of multilayered teaching opportunity this new space affords. Continuum provoked specific conversations about media, texture, and form, but the larger questions—those about gender, life process and the creation of a body of work—linger and continue to color classroom discussions about the value of art. It is the duration of this visual dialogue between artist and student that generates so much excitement: the sense of seeds sown; images engraved on imagination; the gauntlet of artistic challenge and promise being passed. The title, Continuum, takes on a larger meaning as the students who came, studied, listened and looked, carry Kate Blacklock’s work into the future with them.

— Betsy VanOot Director, Foster Gallery

Works By Page Number 7.

Golden Milkweed 2008 direct object scan (detail p.37)

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Teapot with Hands 1999 13 × 9 × 8 inches porcelain with china paint

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Vanitas #5 2009 direct object scan

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Blue Door with Crystals 1999 15 × 7 inches transfer inkjet on paper

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Leaf Veil 2002 19 (height) × 13 (width) × 13 (depth) inches porcelain and china paint 13.

Changes 2003 20 × 16 × 16 inches porcelain and china paint 14.

Not a Swan Song 1996 20 × 15 × 6 inches clay and glaze 20.

Blue Glass Cup 2009 direct object scan 21.

Blue Glass Vase 2003 23 × 17 × 11 inches porcelain and oils 22.

White Tulip 2007 detail oil on panel and porcelain

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Vessel with Butterflies 1999 13 × 7 × 6 inches porcelain and china paint 26.

Green Lobed Vessel 1995 28 × 12 × 13 inches clay, glaze and luster 27.

Lautrec 2009 direct object scan 28.

Stewartia Petals 2008 direct object scan (detail) 29.

Teardrop Inside 1996 15 × 8 × 4 inches bronze 30.

Poppies 2003 21 × 17 × 14 inches porcelain, china paints and oils

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Single Poppy 2008 direct object scan 32.

Double Epiphyllum 2008 direct object scan ultrachrome ink on paper 33.

Dyptich 2005 22 × 42 × 18 inches porcelain, china paints and oils 34.

Cherries 2002 16 × 14 × 9 inches porcelain with china paint 35.

Rose with Marble 2009 direct object scan 36.

Lidded Vessel 1993 32 × 26 × 13 inches clay and glaze 38.

Vanitas #1 2009 direct object scan ultrachrome ink on paper 39.

Still Lives 2003 19 × 14 × 9 inches porcelain and oils