Northern Clay Center: Elemental by Northern Clay Center

NORTHERN CLAY CENTER

Elemental Del Harrow Linda Swanson Susannah Biondo-Gemmell Paula Winokur

Air

Earth

Fire

Water

Elemental Del Harrow Linda Swanson Susannah Biondo-Gemmell Paula Winokur

Air

Earth

Fire

Water

March 15 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; May 12, 2013 Northern Clay Center, Minneapolis, MN Guest Curator and Essayist, Robert Silberman Editing by Elizabeth Coleman

Elemental

Foreword By Sarah Millfelt, Director

© 2013 Northern Clay Center. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, write to Northern Clay Center, 2424 Franklin Avenue East, Minneapolis, MN 55406. http://wwww.northernclaycenter.org Manufactured in the United States First edition, 2013 International Standard Book Number 978-1-932706-27-5 Unless otherwise noted, all dimensions: height precedes width precedes depth.

Elemental continues Northern Clay Center’s tradition of producing thought-provoking exhibitions that bring together emerging and established artists alike, who are exploring process and material through new and compelling means. In conjunction with this particular exhibition, all of the participating artists visited the Center for conversations and gallery talks about their work. Artist Linda Swanson was in residence at NCC for ten days prior to the opening of the exhibition, working to design and install her work with assistance from local college students. The exhibition and the related educational programs were made possible through the generous support from two long-time donors. These include the Windgate Charitable Foundation and Continental Clay Company. Additional support was provided by the arts and cultural heritage fund as appropriated by the Minnesota State Legislature with money from the Legacy Amendment vote of the people of Minnesota on November 4, 2008. Thank you to Robert Silberman for his vision, tireless work, and writing. Thank you to Elizabeth Coleman for her collaboration on this publication. Additional thanks to NCC’s Exhibitions Committee; NCC’s Exhibitions Manager, Michael Arnold; and NCC’s Exhibitions Installer, Jamie Lang.

Northern Clay Center

Elemental

Elemental By Robert Silberman

Elemental offers a contemporary take on an ancient idea, presenting work by four artists in relation to the concept of the four elements: air, earth, fire, and water. The pre-Socratic Greek philosophers, as philosophers are wont to do, attempted to explain the universe. Pythagoras is probably the best known because of his theorem about triangles. Yet, his mathematical ideas were bound up with ideas about music and harmony, as well as other subjects including religion. His study of the proper ratios governing stringed instruments, so that the musical notes would be harmonious, was not altogether separate from his ideas about the music of the heavenly spheres, with planets and stars revolving in a celestial symphony. In the world of early philosophy, mathematics and metaphysics, poetry and cosmology, were one. Other pre-Socratics tried to identify the fundamental material of the cosmos. Thales said that water was the original element. Anaximenes said that everything was composed of air. Xenophanes, according to some commentators, regarded earth as the original source material. And Heraclitus said that the cosmos was, is, and always will be everlasting fire. A fifth element, aether, a mysterious quintessence, was frequently included as a basic element, and sometimes so were wind, clouds, or rocks. There were parallel models in non-Western thought, as in traditional Chinese cosmology, where wood and metal replace air. But that system is based more on changing states of being than on elements. In the West, the formulation holding that the world is based on four fundamental elements — air, earth, fire, and water — was first introduced by Empedocles and widely accepted by the time of Aristotle. These arcane ideas may now be of interest only to historians of philosophy. Along with other beliefs from before the rise of modern science — in alchemical transmutation of base metals into gold, in spontaneous human combustion, in a flat earth, or in a solar system where the sun revolves around the earth — they may seem fantastic, antiquarian relics, fit for display in a museum of discarded ideas. But they remain fascinating, if not as credible scientific explanations, then as metaphor and myth. That is perhaps ironic, given that Thales tried to replace mythological explanations with scientific ones.

Northern Clay Center

Arguments based upon origins have a special force, even if we have learned that trying to determine origins, whether of sin, species, or constitutional law, is not easy. Elemental embraces the idea of the four elements as a conceit, a poetic or imaginative concept (not without a touch of playfulness), rather than a scientific fact. The exhibit also presents the idea, more earnestly, as an artistic fact, because whether air, earth, fire, and water are regarded as the original and fundamental elements of the world, individually or in consort, they undeniably have been the basic elements in ceramics. Addressing this dual frame of reference, the exhibition presents the response of four individual artists to four individual elements in the form of installations and sculptural works. There is no single way any of the four elements appears in ceramics. If this exhibition seeks to avoid the dangers of arguing from origins in a literal fashion, it also is wary of the dangers of aesthetic essentialism, that is, of reducing ceramics to four required elements, as if proscribing the introduction of any other element as impure. It also avoids the suggestion that there is an appropriate way for each element to be employed. Del Harrow’s use of animation and Susannah Biondo-Gemmell’s idea that electricity is the new fire, are obvious signs of an escape from any purist insistence on how an element can be used, and on what ceramics and ceramic art should be. If one path in contemporary ceramics takes a revivalist, even fundamentalist, turn back to traditional wood-firing as the most authentic and pure form of ceramics, another takes a postmodern “all is permitted” approach, in terms of materials, modern media, and an embrace of contemporary popular culture and taste. The pre-Socratic thinkers may have emphasized one element as the principal and original material of the universe, and even the element to which all things ultimately return. But they were also concerned with metamorphosis and change of state. Heraclitus privileged fire, but had other elements arise through different mixtures or proportions, as in modern science where water may change state and be a liquid, solid, or gas depending on the specific circumstances. In ceramics, the physical materials of earth and water are transformed through the agency of the immaterial elements, fire and air. Ceramic creation is not to be reduced to pure mathematics, in a simple equation — air + earth + fire + water = ceramics. After all, the contribution of the artist would have to be introduced: + art. The alchemical magic of ceramics, to revert to a pre-modern, or at least a romantic view, requires that the outcome be more than the sum of the parts, the elements mechanically combined. To effect an aesthetic transformation, the contribution of the artist, in the form of intelligence, imagination, and skill, is the most fundamental element of all.

Elemental

Air would seem an unlikely subject for work in ceramics, given the materiality of clay, even if air is necessary to support the fire that transforms clay into ceramics. Kate MacDowell has created poetic images of air in relation to life and breath. Her translucent porcelain sculptures of human lungs with small birds inside, combine breathing and flight, making air seem visible. Jeanne Quinn exploited another relationship between ceramics and air in dramatic fashion by encasing helium balloons in clay, setting off the material and the immaterial, weight and lightness. As the clay dried, it would crack and fall off, allowing the balloons to rise, even as the clay shards fell and covered the gallery floor.

Del Harrow uses a different approach to address the relationship between ceramics and air, even as he introduces the idea of breath and a sense of dynamism and drama. His Elemental installation, Air/Breath (2013), features three major components. An animation shows two pot forms. The first is a photographic representation of a classic Chinese pot, the other is a digital rendering of an unglazed pot that begins with the same shape as the Chinese example, but expands and contracts as if breathing. The sound track presents the sound of breathing. This illustration of the idea that pots breathe is, in part, a humorous play on two common anthropomorphizing notions. One is that pots are like human bodies, with lips, necks, shoulders, bellies, and feet. The other is that pots metaphorically incorporate breath because of their hollow interior space, reflected on the outside in a more constricted, or more expansive, form. The animation is also a serious exploration of the formal and conceptual issues involved in such breathing. A set of actual pots provides a complement, a physical embodiment of the transformation of the physical form. The pots shift the presentation from illusory space to real space, from the illusion of materiality to real materiality. The pots were created using a computer-controlled prototyping machine to cut plaster molds. The first and last pot in the series are classical forms, but many of the intermediary forms are hybrids. All have a glazed, white-gloss surface that heightens an awareness of the tool marks. The forms are closed on top, so that they are seen as sculptural forms rather than utilitarian vessels, but this is meant as a subtle clarification rather than a polemical statement. A large drawing, the third element in the installation, is also a digital product. Executed in graphite, but based upon output from the wire-frame models used to create the pot forms, the images appear one on top of another. So much for the mark of the hand in drawing, or the

Northern Clay Center

traces of the maker’s hands recorded in the clay on a hand-thrown pot. Harrow does, however, control the process to create the impression that the lines in the drawing are not entirely mechanical. He is not really criticizing the traditional association of craft and fine art with the handmade. That might be a dangerous heresy, especially in Minnesota. Rather, he is exploring the new field of digital fabrication and the interplay between mass fabrication and customization. At the same time, the installation is part of a series addressing the subject of pot morphology. What the drawing does pictorially and the animation does cinematically, the pots do physically: they demonstrate the evolution of forms and, in particular, the giving of life to inorganic physical material. “Animation” means, literally, giving breath or spirit. In the philosophy of Anaximenes, soul, which gives humans life, is a special form of air, a distinctive warm breath. There are daunting linguistic and conceptual problems involved in finding modern English equivalents for ancient Greek or Latin terms. Yet the historical background points at what is at stake in considering air and ceramics. What do we mean by a pot that has “life”? In the animation, Harrow first deploys time to represent the embodiment of breath as an activity through images. The animation depicts the spatial doubling of emptiness and fullness, space defined by physical absence and space defined by physical presence. The air remains insubstantial and invisible, even as it can be perceived indirectly through the breathing and physical form of the pot, and the inhalation and exhalation on the sound track. In turn, the actual pots offer a physical record of transformation, with the breathing, in effect, created within the viewer’s mind by looking at the pots sequentially. The drawing completes the ensemble by offering a compressed, instantaneous version of the animation and pots, using yet another system of representation. In a keynote lecture on the state of contemporary ceramics that accompanied the Denver Art Museum’s 2011 exhibition, Overthrown: Clay Without Limits, Peter Schjeldahl lamented the popularity of installation and large-scale sculptural work among a new generation of ceramic artists, including Harrow, who have embraced the expanded field of ceramic art. Schjeldahl said he realized that his complaint was like yelling “Whoa!” after the horses had left the barn, but he nevertheless argued that a sense of intimacy is lost when ceramics turns away from traditional functional pottery. That may be true. It is understandable that Schjeldahl, as a critic operating in the mainstream art world, might wish the craft world to retains its distinctive difference, rather than assimilate completely to fashionable art world modes. Yet Harrow’s Elemental creation, which uses pots, but is definitely not pottery in the traditional sense, shows what can

Elemental

be gained through the new approach, in terms of ambition, formal complexity, and conceptual richness.1

Linda Swanson conjures up a world far removed from modern existence and a mundane sense of time. Her art presents a primordial, strange creation suggesting Earth eons ago — or maybe Mars, in all its isolation and barrenness, before it came to be probed, sampled, and recorded by human devices. The French poet and critic Paul Valery, after all, observed in his famous essay, “On the Pre-Eminent Dignity of the Arts of Fire,” that “a habitable Earth, a Mars, are after all, nothing but cool bodies.”2 Swanson’s physically rough, but conceptually refined, installations and sculptural works exploit the special qualities of bentonite clay. It can absorb water and expand in volume up to fifteen times; as it grows, it can appear almost alive. Bentonite has, in fact, been designated in some theories as a key ingredient for the start of human life. The illusion of life and corporeality that arises when bentonite expands, pits the senses against the intellect, what we see against what we know, and for Swanson that kind of creative dissonance can make possible a sense of wonder. When bentonite dries, it takes on myriad patterns, offering further room for fascination. Swanson’s Elemental installation, Temperamental Earth (2013), represents “earth.” In adding various kinds of iron to the light gray of the bentonite, Swanson introduces the colors — red, yellow, black, and white — associated with the four humors of the body in Hippocratic medicine, another ancient scientific system. But bentonite being no ordinary clay, “earth” here is not ordinary earth, any more than diamonds are ordinary carbon. The work also suggests the Earth. 1 For Overthrown, see Gwen F. Chanzit, Overthrown: Clay Without Limits, 2 vols. (Denver: Denver Art Museum, 2011). Schjeldahl’s speech is unpublished; my comments are based on statements made by Del Harrow to me and the comments of a blogger for the Sandra Phillips Gallery, see: http://sandraphillipsgallery.blogspot.com/2011_09_01_archive.html. In discussing Harrow’s work [in “Del Harrow: Objects and Orbits,” Ceramics: Art and Perception, 84 (2011): 80–84], author Glenn Brown remarks, not without justification, that “the installation as a device has become generally, often painfully, cliché (a protraction of a 1980s fizzled art-world apocalypse, an endless reiteration of a by-now-superfluous deconstruction of sculptural presence, and an instant formula for the look of art-school work).” He exempts Harrow from this critique. For Harrow, see delharrow.net. 2 In Paul Valery, Degas, Manet, Morisot, trans. David Paul (New York: Bollingen Foundation and Pantheon Books, 1960) 172, author’s emphasis.

Northern Clay Center

Swanson frequently creates works with an ambiguous sense of scale that suggests both close-up views and long vistas, or aerial views of landscape features such as ravines and gorges, buttes and mountain ranges. Swanson’s emphasis on metamorphosis introduces an emphasis on time, since the work is not finished before the exhibition and then displayed in a completed form. Instead, it is only brought to a certain stage in creation, brought to the starting line, as it were, and then displayed as a work in process, if not progress. As in some of the more elaborate pre-Socratic thinking about the elements, in which variables such as wetness and dryness, heat and cold, density and thinness, produce seemingly endless metamorphosis, change in Swanson’s art is, so to speak, the only constant. Stability and finality do not exist. Mutability rules. Ceramic transformations may be dramatic, but visible only in traces: the run of the glaze, frozen in time; the flames in the kiln, caught in a subtle breath of carbon, trapped on a surface. The final product may indicate change, or deny it. An elegant dinner plate, to take but one example, need not show anything of the origins of the materials, or the transformations that led to its final glossy existence. In Swanson’s work, the time of creation and development does not stop, but continues, and is bound up with the time of decay and dissolution. A romantic emphasis on process combines with a sense of scientific observation, introducing both mystery and objectivity to what Swanson describes as “an experience of the transformational nature of ceramic materials over time.” The intricate and powerful changes that take place, when bentonite clay and water come together, concern more than ceramics, because they “open onto questions of our own being and becoming, and how we find ourselves in a world in flux.”3 The French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss observed how the binary opposition between the raw and the cooked defined the relationship between nature and culture: going from eating raw food, to eating cooked food, marked a signal change in human evolution. In ceramics, the move from the raw to the cooked is definitive: clay becomes ceramics when cooked, that is, fired. If some of Swanson’s works remain raw, unfired, that should not prevent them from being regarded as ceramics. They take their place in a lineage that includes James Melchert’s famous 1972 performance, Changes, where participants dipped their heads in slip and then let it dry, and the installations by Sadashi Inuzuka that present unfired slip, allowed to dry and crack, as an ironic, but forceful statement about water resources. Given the initial action that sets the bentonite reaction in motion, a cooking of sorts does take place in Swanson’s works, even without fire. Amy Gogarty has remarked that, as display, Swanson’s works can seem “part mad science project, part sober diorama.”4 Whether the

Elemental

landscape in Swanson’s art is raw or cooked, whether the earth, so to speak, becomes earthenware, the art itself is a deliberate act of both control and the surrender of control. In revealing and reveling in process, Swanson embraces chance: the reaction of the materials to one another and their transformation is not automatic, but involves uncertainty and surprise. Swanson exposes the interaction between materials in a realtime experience that features simultaneous creation and destruction, and an equal fascination with beginnings and endings. Her works compress geological time, yet expand ceramic time. She has stated her interest in exploring the mystery of “how matter takes form.”5 In her work, Swanson manages to encapsulate the Earth in a gallery-laboratory, where earth is the fundamental element, and art the process and product. Just add water. What could be more elemental, more mysterious, and more wondrous than that?

Susannah Biondo-Gemmell takes an innovative approach to the role of fire in ceramics. Like Nina Hole and John Roloff, she has created large-scale sculptures, fired outdoors as performance pieces, sometimes with photo projection and audio effects to enhance the spectacle.6 She acknowledges, and at times exploits, the traditional role of fire and heat, but has moved in a new direction. For Biondo-Gemmell, “electricity is the new fire.”7 This might suggest a too-neat slogan, like saying Edison is the new Prometheus. In an age of high technology and new media, that might appear a lesson learned long ago. But electric kilns and digital controls are still relatively recent developments. And that technological lesson

3 Linda Swanson, Artist Statement, http://www.lindaswansonstudio.com/#!statement/ component_73913. 4 Amy Gogarty, “Ceramics, Dissolution and Weak Thought: Towards a New Understanding of Practice,” Craft Journal, 3.2 (Spring 2010): 21. 5 See Marielle Ernold-Gandouet, “Les Observations de Linda Swanson,” La Revue de la Céramique et du Verre, 157 (2007) 55 – 57. And also www.artaxis.org/ceramics/swanson_ linda/linda_swanson.html. 6 Keith Harrison has also done performative ceramic works, most notably M25 London Orbital for the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2008, when he created a scale model of the motorway around London and performed a firing that used electrical wiring to fuse glaze material. 7 For this and further quotations from Biondo-Gemmell, see her artist statement at www.susannahbiondogemmell.com.

Northern Clay Center

plays only a limited part in Biondo-Gemmell’s art. Electricity — controlled electricity, not, say, lightning — represents fire and heat without flame. The glowing kanthal wire, the heating element in electric kilns, does not provide a rapidly burning fuse, as in fireworks or explosives, but a steady glow. It is, so to speak, a live and lively wire. Symbolically, it is more than a contemporary form of fire, and of heat and light. It stands for what fire represents if considered more broadly: energy and energy transfer. It is not the fire or flame alone, then, but the relationship between the fire and the element receiving the fire that is central. Biondo-Gemmell describes fire as her “material, tool, and muse.” Her concern with “the metaphysical nature of energy exchange” emphasizes the entire thermodynamic system, not so much as an exercise in physics, but as a metaphor for the basic processes of life. To consider ceramics from the perspective of heat transfer raises questions of life and death, order and entropy, geological metamorphosis and human existence. In Biondo-Gemmell’s earlier Toys for Prometheus (2006), the kanthal wire appears in geometric settings, assuming some of the rigor of Minimalism with an optical flair that recalls the vibrant colors (and sometimes humming electronics) of artists such as Dan Flavin. The wire, like the neon tubes in Flavin’s sculptures, presents light in a way that is not entirely optical, like a laser beam, because there is a physical presence. Yet the refined quality of the wire and the settings removes these sculptures from the rawness of the handmade and the traditionally fired. These striking objects are distinctly contemporary and technological in feel, although they do not mime any particular technology, or pretend to serve any utilitarian purpose. In contrast, the Drawings for Prometheus (2013) series offers not so much a contemporary, technological, and purist vision of fire, but relics of fire that manage to be both primal and pure, raw and refined. Biondo-Gemmell has described these works as “object drawings,” artifacts that record the creative moment and “some great transformation that once occurred.” They combine dark, lava-like masses, which suggest the crudest encounter between earth and fire, with white porcelain inclusions, which appear as hidden treasures revealed, like a geode inside a seemingly ordinary rock, or the remnant forms of human figures modeled by volcanic ash at Pompeii. The porcelain inclusions are the products of commercial and industrial ceramic molds for religious and cultural icons, but the figural aspects are recognizable only when seen protruding from the back of the works. Biondo-Gemmell regards their hidden significance as akin to myth, or the collective unconscious.8 Within the geometric frame, the play between the rough and the smooth, the (almost) black and the white, dramatizes the workings of the fire, its apparent arbitrariness,

Elemental

and its production of a beauty that appears accidental no matter how controlled its creation. Biondo-Gemmell’s Elemental installation, 1.20.12 (2013), continues to explore the aesthetics of heat transfer, but adds an important concern: the body. This work uses kanthal wire, but in more free, less geometrical way, suggesting in some spots a straightforward mechanical wiring, but in others the spontaneous, convoluted tracery of automatic drawing. The ceramics, too, are less geometrical, with irregular platter-like forms with dimpled surfaces. The contrast between black and white, rough and smooth, gives way to white porcelain and a situation more organic and less geological. If, as with Harrow’s Air/Breath, the connection between body and vessel is invoked, the sentiment is less one of dry wit and analytical investigation, than of dramatic juxtaposition of hot metal and (visually) cool clay. For the artist, the wire represents “the movement of energy in the space.” The light and heat build up in terms of quantity and movement in the six units that make up the overall work. But in the last one, placed lower on the wall, there is little wire or movement, indicating an abrupt end to this growth, and to the cycle of creation. What Biondo-Gemmell refers to as her interest in “ceramic phenomenology and material experimentation” repeatedly leads to an emphasis on process. In 1.20.12, a work that commemorates a personal loss, it is as if the clay body were a body made of clay. The drama of light and heat provides a demonstration of heat exchange, a visual sign of transfer and transformation. And at the center of each part of the overall installation is the nimble, energetic pulse of the glowing kanthal wire, the dance-like expression of fire in its modern form.

Paula Winokur has had a long and distinguished career as an artist and educator. Some of her projects stand apart, however, because of their sheer ambition. Although early on she created fabricated fireplace surrounds, she is perhaps best known for handsome groupings in porcelain that combine relatively small-scale vessel forms and a ceramic shelf or ledge. The expansive move in her art, from vessels to landscape, and from pedestal pieces to large-scale sculptures and installations, is evident in the progression from the installation Architectural Entry: Boulder Field (1993), through Calving Glacier IV

8 Susannah Biondo-Gemmell, Artist Talk, Northern Clay Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota, March 14, 2013.

Northern Clay Center

(2009 –10), to her most recent major work, Palisades Pinnacle (2012), devoted to the Palisades, the imposing rock formation on the Hudson, north of New York City.9 Winokur’s engagement with the landscape arose from two sources: Alaska and the American Southwest. The special character of the Arctic, with its glaciers, desolate landscapes, and surrounding ocean, seems especially well-suited for her strong, yet subtle, approach. The American West, famous for the drama of seemingly boundless space and specific places such as Yellowstone and Yosemite, also caught Winokur’s attention. She has focused on Chaco Canyon and other sites from the Southwest, perhaps because of the power of the ruins and the ancient civilizations they conjure, but also because in the desert, the vegetation plays a lesser role, and the emphasis often falls on the geologic formations in all their stark grandeur. In the Palisades sculpture and other works such as White Butte: Porcelain Landscape (2004), ceramics represents rock or soil. But in Calving Glacier IV, Ice Cores (2006), and Above and Below (2010), Winokur engages in a kind of aesthetic punning, playing upon the resemblance between ice and that most elegant and enshrined of all ceramic materials, porcelain. Winokur’s sculptures that use porcelain to represent ice are more than a play upon a certain material resemblance. The icebergs also have their Titanic aspect, a formal fascination, because what is below the surface may be greater than what is above. The result is a basic play between revelation and concealment, the visible and the invisible, the known and the unknown. More important, however, the icebergs, as part of Winokur’s larger engagement with glaciers, open up the issue of global warming. This is implicit in Ice Cores, a set of cylindrical elements modeled on scientific samples, yet with a slight taper at the bottom end to evoke ritualistic vessels. They display Winokur’s characteristically rich treatment of surfaces, including delicate blues and earth tones, and written statements that suggest scientific annotation, but carry environmental weight, for instance, by indicating that ice cores record the earth’s climate history. The issue is explicit in Global Warnings (2005), a group of spheres that, as the punning title suggests, are globes, representations of the Earth. At first glance they resemble snowballs, or balls of ice — another glacial age? — and they are inscribed with written messages about the environment. In Biblical terms, human civilization is reborn when the waters of the Flood recede 9 See Jennifer McGregor, “Paula Winokur,” in Foregrounding the Palisades (Bronx, NY: Wave Hill Glyndor Gallery, 2012): 18 – 21; Marianne Aav, “Paula Winokur: Harmony is of the Essence” in Paula Winokur, Margaret West, and Kristina Riska, ed. Marianne Aav and Eeva Viljamem (Helsinki, Finland: DesignMuseo, 2005): 6 –17; Gerard Brown, “Paula Winokur’s Poetic Earth,” Ceramics: Art and Perception, 59 (2005): 80 – 81; and paulawinokur.com.

Elemental

and Noah and the inhabitants of the ark can go forth and multiply. In scientific terms, human civilization prospers after the ice ages, when the glaciers recede and humans can reside in areas left in their wake. Winokur’s latest works, however, all suggest that whatever the metaphysical or formal significance of ice, as expressed in her porcelain sculptures, the current radical transformation of ice into water is not a happy omen for human civilization. The procession of time and history now represents, not a simple cycle, or a neutral record of change of state, but a threat. The fracturing of the ice forms in Calving Glacier IV, like the cleavages in the rock forms in Palisades Pinnacle, has great formal strength, a product of Winokur’s compositional expertise and brilliant exploitation of the contrast between rough and smooth. Above all, there is a sense of dynamic tension, with an artistic balance struck from powerful, shifting geophysical forces. Winokur’s glaciers and icebergs are more about climate change and global warming than about another important environmental issue, clean water. They were not created to make a direct statement about water as a liquid and natural resource. But then neither, perhaps, were other significant ceramic works such as Jeff Mongrain’s Hollow Drop (2003) and Square Yard of Water (2005). There are also the innumerable ceramic fountains and other contemporary works that feature water, and reveal, at least the visual pleasures afforded by water’s transparency and flow, as well as the aural pleasures sometimes associated with water flowing. (Think “babbling brooks,” not “raging floods.”) Such works, however ambitious or modest artistically, can help create an increased appreciation of the beauty and value of water. By presenting porcelain as ice, Winokur brings ceramics and water closer together, highlighting the ability of water to change state from liquid to solid, and back again, and emphasizing the transformative nature of the ceramic process. At the same time, she points beyond ceramics to the world, where transformation is ongoing, at once alluring and threatening. In Winokur’s art, ceramic creation and natural phenomena come together in a beauty and harmony that, whatever the disturbing undertones, are worthy of Pythagoras.

I am happy to acknowledge the support of Sarah Millfelt, director of Northern Clay Center, and of the entire staff, especially Michael Arnold, Elizabeth Coleman, Jamie Lang, and Dustin Yager. I would also like to thank Emily Galusha, former director of NCC, and the members of the NCC Exhibition Committee for welcoming the proposal for this exhibition. My thanks, as always, to Anedith. Above all, I must express my admiration and gratitude to the artists.

Northern Clay Center

Air

Elemental

Earth

Fire

Water

Northern Clay Center

Del Harrow

Elemental

Air

Del Harrow

Working towards an exhibition like this one — where one is asked to make a new work to fit a theme — is like getting a kind of assignment. I mean this in the best way. It presents an opportunity to both focus and extend one’s practice. I’ve also felt some sympathy for my students and the regular challenge I give to them of responding to a prompt in a way that is poetic, rather than simply didactic, or explanatory. My advice to them is that research is useful, particularly when it is complemented by an openness to intuition and even impulse. In this case, it felt intuitive to connect the classical element of air with atmosphere, or wind, but also with “breath.” The classical

elements would seem to function as a way of connecting empirical physical experience with abstract and symbolic meaning, and breath is the bodily experience of air, pressure, and wind. Potters often refer to the breath of a pot, which, along with “the lip,” “the belly,” and “the foot,” is another example of the anthropomorphizing of pottery form. Among these, the breath is unique, in that it refers to the form as a whole, the general proportion and distribution of volume. But while individual pots are static, breath is continuous and animated. This piece began with two historical pots, each seeming to exemplify an extreme of breath. One inhaling and one exhaling, the

Del Harrow, Air/ Breath, 2013, video, slip-cast porcelain, plywood, formica, graphite on vellum.

Northern Clay Center

movement of breath, or breathing, is the transition between these two states. Here this transition is presented as a series, or morphology, modeled by using computer software. The entire series of pots was produced from a single mold. They were cast from a porcelain slip into the plaster mold, which was carved reductively using a computer-controlled router. After each casting, the plaster mold was put back on the CNC machine and carved again, removing more material as the form progressed from “exhaling” towards “inhaling.” By working in this way, reductively carving the same mass, the form begins as a classical archetype, but the final form is a composite of the two source pots. Rather than the average of the two, however, the final form is the maximum of volume and breath and the mold itself is a negative space, a void, a container of air.

Del Harrow, Air/Breath (detail), 2013, video, slip-cast porcelain, plywood, formica, graphite on vellum.

Del Harrow

Elemental

Del Harrow is a sculptor and educator based in Fort Collins, Colorado. He is an Assistant Professor of Art at Colorado State University. He taught previously at Penn State University and Kansas City Art Institute. Harrow has lectured widely: at the University of Colorado, the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University, and the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, among other venues. He has taught a number of workshops (recently at Penland School of Crafts, Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, and Cranbrook Academy of Art) that address digital and parametric modeling in conjunction with analog fabrication and “hands-on” work with clay. His work explores this same intersection of digital design with manual- and skill-based fabrication processes; it has been recently exhibited at the NCECA conference; the Dolphin Gallery in Kansas City, Missouri; and the Denver Art Museum.

Northern Clay Center

Linda Swanson

Elemental

Earth

Linda Swanson

Earth may be the most stable of the elements, yet it takes on an infinite variety of forms. In its interaction with the other elements, it is continually formed, reformed, and transformed. It melts, crystallizes, erupts into clouds, and aggregates into masses. Earth can change in an instant and endure for eons. This ephemeral installation puts into play the changing nature of Earth, as well as its potential for regeneration. Earth speaks to us not only of temporality, but also of corporeality. The minerals that sustain life are found in earth. Life’s vital forces were understood by the ancient Greeks in terms of the four bodily humors of red blood, white phlegm, and yellow and black bile. The earth can take

these colors according to the presence of iron. Just as earth formations appearing in a field of bentonite clay recall both land and body, these earth colors recall the character of life forces that flow within it. In exploring the materiality of clay, I am interested in how the element of earth can open onto questions of our own being and becoming, and in how we find ourselves in a world of flux. Ceramic materials are inherently transformative. Yet, in spite of our ability to scientifically explain what is happening, there is a certain mystery as to how matter changes state and form, seeming at first to be one thing, then becoming another. Light things become dark, soft things

Linda Swanson, Temperamental Earth, 2013, bentonite, clay, water, metal and metallic oxides, wood, nylon.

Northern Clay Center

become hard, solid things begin to flow. I am interested in the capacity of ceramics to engage our sense of temporality and corporeality, through the sensual perception of material and processes over time.The world is never completely disclosed to us, but rather offers a profound resistance. I am interested in this resistance, and in finding and exploring the gaps between what we know and what we experience. In this I share the view of the early geneticist, JBS Haldane, who wrote that, “The world will not perish from a lack of wonders, but from a lack of wonder.” Originally from California, Linda Swanson studied ceramics at Tekisui Museum in Japan. She earned a BA in Art History from University of California, Santa Barbara; a BFA in ceramics from California State University, Long Beach; and an MFA from New York State College of

Linda Swanson, Temperamental Earth (detail), 2013, bentonite, clay, water, metal and metallic oxides, wood, nylon.

Linda Swanson

Ceramics at Alfred University. She has taught ceramics at the Kansas City Art Institute, and, currently, at Concordia University in Montreal. Her raw and kiln-fired ceramic works have been exhibited in Canada, France, and the United States. The work has earned awards from the Delaware Center for Contemporary Arts, the Cattaraugus County Arts Council, and the National Council on the Education in the Ceramic Arts, including an emerging artist award in 2013. Recent exhibitions include Lacoste Gallery at SOFA Chicago, Earth & Alchemy at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston, and a public art installation at the Parks Canada – Lachine Canal National Historic Site in Montreal. She has received grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Northern Clay Center

Susannah Biondo-Gemmell

Fire

Susannah Biondo-Gemmell Fire is my material, my tool, and my muse. I use ceramic materials to investigate, articulate, and record the physical and metaphysical nature of energy. Electricity is the animating principle of my “machine objects.” Electricity is “fire” made contemporary. Through the form of electricity, I retain fire as a means to demonstrate, rather than illustrate, energy relationships. Heat and light, fire’s products of combustion, create a sensory narrative. These “machine objects” are intimate, quiet, and demand viewers’ readiness to suspend their disbelief. They are asked to invest in the subtly incurring storyline.

Susannah Biondo-Gemmell, Drawings for Prometheus, 2013, cast lava glaze with embedded slip-cast porcelain, each approximately 6 x 6 x 10”.

My “object drawings” represent a moment past. Fire functions as my collaborative tool. I set up a series of relationships between ceramic materials that are manipulated and shaped during the firing process. I cut into these blocks of material to excavate a porcelain shape — a “drawing” that is an artifact of this collaborative process. I reveal this path as a linear record of the creative moment. These “object drawings” create a post-phenomenon experience, acting as an artifact of some great transformation that once occurred. As Gaston Bachelard notes, “Thus ‘the eminent dignity of the arts of fire’ arises from the fact that their products bear the most profoundly human mark, the mark

Northern Clay Center

of primitive love….The forms created by fire are modeled more than any other.” My interest in ceramic-material experimentation is core to my studio practice. My creative explorations are manifested through physical forms, but they speak of greater phenomenon — personal, geological, and spiritual — that serve as life’s driving forces.

Susannah Biondo-Gemmell

Ceramic Arts, Helena, Montana; and the Museum of the Living Artist, San Diego, California. She received her MFA in ceramic art from the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University in 2006 and her BFA in Ceramics from Washington University in St. Louis in 2002.

Susannah Biondo-Gemmell currently holds the position of Assistant Professor of Art at Cornell College in Mt. Vernon, Iowa. She teaches courses in 3-D studio basics, ceramics, sculpture, casting, installation, and time-based art. Recent exhibitions include shows at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Boston; Coe College, Cedar Rapids, Iowa; Eastern Washington University, Cheney, Washington; Mt. Mercy University, Cedar Rapids, Iowa; the Archie Bray Foundation for the

Susannah Biondo-Gemmell, 1.20.12, 2013, porcelain, aluminum, kanthal wire, and other mixed media, each 13 x 13 x 5”.

Northern Clay Center

Paula Winokur

Water Paula Winokur

Porcelain is a material usually thought of as delicate, fragile, and transparent. Considered the primary clay from which all other clays are derived, it comes from the earth as pure white, strong, and durable. Fired, it can resemble frozen water — both snow and ice, depending on surface texture and treatment. Porcelain attracted me because of these qualities, rather than its transparency. I have chosen to work with this clay because it has allowed me to explore issues in the landscape without making literal interpretations. My work has been influenced by information gathered at various “sites,” places in the natural environment that I have responded to

visually. The earth itself, particularly cliffs, ledges, crevices, and canyons: the effects of wind, earthquakes, glaciers, and other natural phenomenon such as geological “shifts” and “faults” interest me. In Iceland, I observed Moulins, or Glacial Mills, which are holes in the ice, revealing the water below. They are often a wonderful blue-green color. I have incorporated this effect in several works. My pieces in Elemental refer to glaciers, ice cores, and icebergs. The largest work, Calving Glacier IV (2009 –10), examines how the force of water can split ice and cause it to break off from the larger glacier, fall into the sea, and become an iceberg, which, when it melts, adds to

Paula Winokur, Installation view, from left to right: Ice Cores, 2006, porcelain, stains, ceramic pencil, 32 x 33 x 3”; Calving Glacier IV, 2009/10, porcelain, plexiglass, 33 x 48 x 60”; Above and Below, 2010, porcelain, lucite, 40 x 24 x 6”.

Calving Glacier IV Lent by Racine Art Museum, gift of Michael Winokur and Lana Simenov.

Northern Clay Center

a rise in sea level. The black plexiglass under Calving Glacier, serves as both plinth and mirror, reflecting the porcelain forms just as seawater reflects glaciers and icebergs. Paula Winokur received a BFA from Tyler School of Art, Temple University, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She also studied for a summer session at the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University in Alfred, New York. In 1973, Winokur traveled for the first time to the American West. The plane trip changed her point of view — toward the landscape and human actions that alter the face of nature. During the 1980s, she became increasingly fascinated by the remains of past civilizations, either as artifacts, or as marks on the face of the earth. She taught at Arcadia University, Glenside, Pennsylvania, for thirty

Paula Winokur, Ice Cores, 2006, porcelain, stains, ceramic pencil, 32 x 33 x 3”.

Paula Winokur

years and has an extensive exhibition record. Her work is in public and private collections including the Mint Museum of Craft & Design and the National Museum of American Art. Winokur has received grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Art and the National Council on the Education in the Ceramic Arts, as well as many others.

Northern Clay Center

Northern Clay Centerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s mission is the advancement of the ceramic arts. Its goals are to promote excellence in the work of clay artists, to provide educational opportunities for artists and the community, and to encourage and expand the publicâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s appreciation and understanding of the ceramic arts.

Board of Directors Ellen Watters, Chair Teresa Matsui Sanders, Vice Chair Rick Scott, Treasurer/Secretary Lynne Alpert Robert Briscoe Philip Burke Sheldon Chester Linda Coffey Debra Cohen Nancy Hanily-Dolan Bonita Hill, M.D. Sally Wheaton Hushcha Christopher Jozwiak Mark Lellman Bruce Lilly Alan Naylor Mark Pharis Jim Ridenour T Cody Turnquist Robert Walsh

Director Sarah Millfelt Exhibitions Manager Michael Arnold Exhibitions Installer Jamie Lang

Honorary Members Andy Boss Kay Erickson Warren MacKenzie Joan Mondale Director Emerita Emily Galusha

Unless otherwise noted, all photographs by Peter Lee Design by Joseph D.R. OLeary, VetoDesign.com

NORTHERN CLAY CENTER 2424 Franklin Avenue East Minneapolis, Minnesota 55406 T: 612.339.8007 F: 612.339.0592 E: nccinfo@northernclaycenter.org I: www.northernclaycenter.org