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Sunday, August 27, 2017

Naomi J. Falk, Artist, United States

Field, 2003
Field continued the extension of self. Through the repetitive gesture and obsessive task of throwing large blocks of clay, I outlined the circumference of the area under my influence.



Swallow(ed) | 20' diameter | Porcelain, saltwater, reclaimed wood | 2006 - 2013 | Installation view | The Gallery at the Macomb Center for the Arts | Macomb Community College | Macomb, MI | Mar 2006 

Swallow(ed) began as a tribute to the individuals affected by 2004's tsunami in Southeast Asia. In 2005, while continuing to build the piece, Katrina, and several others hurricanes, hit the Gulf Coast of the United States. Since then, other coastal areas of the U.S. and the world have been dramatically impacted by natural and man-made disasters. Suffering ongoing effects from Hurricane Sandy (2012), for instance, and the earthquakes in Haiti (2010) and Japan (2011), the work remains relevant and timely. Much remains to be done. 



In Swallow(ed), each palm-sized porcelain bowl is filled with saltwater, representing the ocean, as well as tears. In the wake of the ocean's force, much was damaged or lost. Purposefully built with reclaimed wood, the tables represent, among other things, the man-made structures we create and inhabit. 





Recall(ed) Quilt | 2 1/2" x 1 1/2" x 1" each, 40" wide x var. overall | Porcelain, flannel, batting, organza, thread | | 2010 - ongoing | 

Continuing with the work I did in Recall(ed), the installation/performance involves quilting hand-made porcelain pieces under sheer organza, laying to rest those who have lost their lives in the Iraq war. The remaining porcelain pieces are piled in a 'nest' next to the rocking chair I work in, with the quilt trailing across my lap and off onto the floor.


Jennifer Ling Datchuk, Artist




Human hair woven into the ceramic forms. 


"My work has always dealt with identity, with the sense of being in-between, an imposter, neither fully Chinese nor Caucasian. I have learned to live with the constant question about my appearance: “What are you?” I change my response depending on my hair, make-up, clothes, what I am doing, where I am at, or what I am eating – who I am at the moment. I find people are rarely satisfied with my answer. I explore this conflict through my chosen media – porcelain, which nods to my Chinese heritage but also represents “pure” white – the white desire I find in both cultures. Bound by these conditions, I stitch together my individual nature, unravel the pressures of conformity, and forever experience pain in search of perfection." 

Artist Website:


Ryan Takaba, Artist





Above image example of "figurative bust". 









https://vimeo.com/29158752


STATEMENT
Growing up in Hawai`i, I spent much of my youth observing my grandparent’s attentiveness to their landscape, a residence that was built on ancient lava rock.  With my grandmother in her 90’s and my grandfather since passed, she now has a much smaller space to tend to.  The clippings of flowers she receives from her garden adorn a bedroom altar where every morning my grandmother visits my grandfather through daily prayer.  A prayer involving lighting a candle, burning incense, and arranging fresh flowers.              
I am interested in daily ritual, specifically in relation to the flower and the vase, the candle and the wax, and the incense and ash.  What defines a ritual and not a habit is a question I have been asking with this work.  My grandmother's dedication and belief makes me believe that her process transcends habit into ritual, and ritual into truth.

My studio practice stems from my research in landscape, architecture, and design looking to my grandmother as a source to investigate how objects are used, cared for, and honored.  I am interested in the arrangement of these objects, and through their use, meaning and the composition can change over time.  My practice is performative and durational, attending to the pieces daily through the length of a show.  In some works, I cut, assemble, and connect flowers to complete a composition, and sort stem sizes to regulate its flow of water.  I light candles to use heat to break wax patterns, and I burn incense to mark the wall and cascade ash.  This act engages themes of longing, waiting,and return.  


David Hicks, Artist


Panel Composition in Bluegreen, 2017, Ceramic, 28 x 27 x 10 inches



Dark Fruit, 2017, Ceramic,rope, and metal, 19 x 15 x 9 inches.


MIAMI — American artist David Hicks‘ most recent solo exhibition Clippings and Hard Fruit at Mindy Soloman (May 20 – August 5, 2017) explores how we experience nature and our environment has evolved. The exhibition with its prophetic ceramic wall hangings and vessels reveals an unsettling liminality between modern humanity and the natural world.



Shari Mendelson, Artist

NOT Clay! 
However! 
We can see an influence from Greek and Roman vessels 
and 
how ideas about form, texture, line and space create a meaningful object.  




Shari Mendelson, “Ennion-like Vessel with Ten Handles,” (2015), 15 x 6 x 6 inches




Two-handled jar (amphora) with snakes on handles

Greek
Late Geometric IIA Period
735–720 B.C.
source mfa.org



Shari Mendelson, “Large Purple Vessel with Yellow,” (2016), 28 x 16 x 16 inches









Shari Mendelson, “Blue Syrian Vessel with Long Neck,” (2016), 15 x 5.5 x 6 inches






Terracotta pyxis (box with lid)

Period: Geometric
Date: mid-8th century B.C.
Culture: Greek, Attic
Medium: Terracotta
Dimensions: Overall: 4 1/8 x 11 1/4 in. (10.5 x 28.5 cm)
H. with cover 9 15/16 in. (25.2 cm)
Description: While pyxides are frequently found in burials, they also may have served as a container for small objects during the owner's lifetime. In the grave they may have contained perishable offerings, such as food. The knob of the lid assumes many different forms. Here the articulation of the shaft contrasts particularly with the smooth surface of the box.





Barrel oinochoe, 8th–early 7th century b.c.; Italo-Geometric
Italian peninsula, possibly Campania or Etruria
Terracotta
H. 13 ¼ in.
Metropolitan Museum:
In the Geometric period of about 900 to 700 B.C., Greeks continued to be active seafarers, seeking opportunities for trade and founding new, independent cities in Asia Minor, Italy, and Sicily. In the Late Geometric period, around 760–750 B.C., Greeks from the island of Euboea (near northern Attica) established a colony at Pithekousai, near the Bay of Naples. The settlement received Levantine goods in quantity, as well as Corinthian, Cycladic, and Rhodian pottery, most of which were exported to the Italian mainland. This influx of goods and designs from the East played a major role in initiating the Italic and Etruscan Orientalizing period (ca. 750–575 B.C.). Likewise, Euboean vases were exported from Pithekousai to Campania and Etruria, as were local (Italic) vessels decorated with typical Euboean Late Geometric designs, as on this oinochoe, a small jug that was used to dip out and serve wine. Its main figurative scene, two goats standing upright and, perhaps, nibbling at a tree, is a familiar motif in Near Eastern art, and appears on vases made in Euboea at this time. The distinctive barrel shape of this vessel, however, is more Italic than Greek; similar oinochoi have been found in Etruria, near Bisenzio, and at Marsiliana.
Source: metmuseum.org



Between the beginning of the sixth and the end of the fourth centuries B.C., black- and red-figure techniques were used in Athens to decorate fine pottery while simpler, undecorated wares fulfilled everyday household purposes. With both techniques, the potter first shaped the vessel on a wheel. Most sizeable pots were made in sections; sometimes the neck and body were thrown separately, and the foot was often attached later. Once these sections had dried to a leather hardness, the potter assembled them and luted the joints with a slip (clay in a more liquid form). Lastly, he added the handles. In black-figure vase painting, figural and ornamental motifs were applied with a slip that turned black during firing, while the background was left the color of the clay. Vase painters articulated individual forms by incising the slip or by adding white and purple enhancements (mixtures of pigment and clay). In contrast, the decorative motifs on red-figure vases remained the color of the clay; the background, filled in with a slip, turned black. Figures could be articulated with glaze lines or dilute washes of glaze applied with a brush. The red-figure technique was invented around 530 B.C., quite possibly by the potter Andokides and his workshop. It gradually replaced the black-figure technique as innovators recognized the possibilities that came with drawing forms, rather than laboriously delineating them with incisions. The use of a brush in red-figure technique was better suited to the naturalistic representation of anatomy, garments, and emotions.
The firing process of both red- and black-figure vessels consisted of three stages. During the first, oxidizing stage, air was allowed into the kiln, turning the whole vase the color of the clay. In the subsequent stage, green wood was introduced into the chamber and the oxygen supply was reduced, causing the object to turn black in the smoky environment. In the third stage, air was reintroduced into the kiln; the reserved portions turned back to orange while the glossed areas remained black.
Painted vases were often made in specific shapes for specific daily uses—storing and transporting wine and foodstuffs (amphora), drawing water (hydria), drinking wine or water (kantharos or kylix), and so on—and for special, often ritual occasions, such as pouring libations (lekythos) or carrying water for the bridal bath (loutrophoros). Their pictorial decorations provide insights into many aspects of Athenian life, and complement the literary texts and 
 from the Archaic and, especially, Classical periods.

Department of Greek and Roman Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
October 2002


Phoebe Cummings, Artist


Phoebe Cummings uses unfired clay to make poetic and performative sculptures and installations that emphasize material, fragility, time, creation, and decay. Working across art, design, and ceramics, she has had a number of residencies in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Greenland, including three months as a Kohler Arts/Industry Resident (2008) and six months as the Ceramics Artist-in-Residence at the Victoria and Albert Museum (2010). She was also awarded a ceramics fellowship at London’s Camden Arts Centre (2012–13).


After the Death of the Bear, 2013; clay, cement, steel, wire and polythene, 7 x 5 x 3.5 meters. Installation at British Ceramics Biennial, Stoke-on-Trent, 2013.







Images and text source cfileonline.org

Saturday, August 19, 2017

Ruth Duckworth, Artist, b. 1919 Germany, d. 2009 USA



Above image an example of "stacking". 
These examples can also inspire the prompt "mountain" 
for the 22 Sculptures Assignment























2007

Ruth Duckworth, a sculptor whose work in clay and bronze included monumental sculptures and murals, as well as small-scale, intimate pieces, died last Sunday in Chicago. She was 90.
Her death was confirmed by Thea Burger, her agent.
Ms. Duckworth followed an idiosyncratic career path, starting as a stone mason in Britain and not turning to ceramics until her 40s, bringing a sculptor’s sensibility to it. Intent on doing large-scale ceramic work, then out of favor in Britain, she accepted a teaching appointment at the University of Chicago in 1964 and began executing monumental ceramic murals and, later, bronze sculptures.
Her stoneware murals, notably “Earth, Water and Sky” (1967-68) and “Clouds Over Lake Michigan” (1976), incorporated topographical swirls and abstractly rendered cloud patterns. Her small works, by contrast, were often delicate and abstract, with surrealist overtones. The influences were varied. The stylized modernism of Henry Moore, Constantin Brancusi and Isamu Noguchi competed for attention with Egyptian, Mexican and Cycladic art.
“She was a great original, pioneering her own path within ceramics, brilliantly exploring the idea of the figure, the vessel and the more abstract form,” said Emmanuel Cooper, a British ceramist and an editor of Ceramic Review.
Ruth Windmüller was born in Hamburg, Germany, on April 10, 1919. Because her father was Jewish, she could not receive an art education under the Nazi regime, so in 1936 she left Germany for Britain, where she studied at the Liverpool School of Art.
With the outbreak of the war she began traveling with her own puppet show in northern England and then found work in a munitions factory making bullets. After studying stone carving at the City and Guilds of London Art School, she worked for a time carving tombstone decorations.
In 1949 she married the sculptor Aidron Duckworth. The marriage ended in divorce. She is survived by a sister, Ilse Windmüller of Holyhead, Wales.
After visiting en exhibition of art from India, Ms. Duckworth resolved to become a ceramist and enrolled at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London in 1956, mainly to learn about glazes. Initially she produced tableware in stoneware and porcelain, but gradually her work became more abstract and sculptural, with forms suggesting pebbles and rocks. It also assumed grander dimensions.
Ceramists, most of them wedded to the tradition of functional pottery thrown on a wheel, puzzled over Ms. Duckworth’s hand-shaped works. Sculptors, working in wood, stone or metal, took a dim view of clay as a medium.
lthough it was dismissed out of hand by Bernard Leach, Britain’s leading ceramist, her work made an immediate impact on younger artists. “Ceramics studios across Britain were soon bursting with pinched porcelain fungi and swelling stoneware fruits,” Tony Franks, an English ceramist, recalled in the Australian magazine Ceramics in 2007. “Organic clay had arrived like a harvest festival, and would remain firmly in place well into the ’70s.”
After taking up a teaching post at the University of Chicago, where she remained until 1977, Ms. Duckworth was commissioned to execute a suite of murals for the entry atrium of the university’s new Geophysical Sciences Building. Using topographical illustrations of Mount Fuji and satellite photos of the earth, she created “Earth, Water and Sky,” a suite of murals covering four walls, with porcelain clouds suspended from the ceiling.
Her most important large-scale work, “Clouds Over Lake Michigan,” is in the Chicago Board Options Exchange Building. Mingling abstract and figurative elements, it depicts the watershed of Lake Michigan overlaid with archaeological fantasies and natural forms. A third major ceramic work was “The Creation” (1982-83), commissioned by the Congregation Beth Israel in Hammond, Ind.
In the last decade she completed several monumental bronze sculptures for the campuses of Eastern Illinois University in Charleston, Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago, and Lewis & Clark Community College in Godfrey, Ill.
Although she remained in Chicago after retiring from teaching, working since the 1980s in a former pickle factory on the city’s north side, Ms. Duckworth exhibited widely in the United States and Europe.
In 2005 she was the subject of a retrospective, “Ruth Duckworth: Modernist Sculptor,” which opened at the Museum of Arts and Design in Manhattan and traveled to six museums around the United States.
Correction: November 1, 2009 
An obituary last Sunday about the sculptor Ruth Duckworth omitted part of the name of one of the colleges for which she completed monumental bronze sculptures in the last decade. It is Lewis & Clark Community College in Godfrey, Ill. — not Lewis and Clark College. (There is a Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Ore.)




Gillian Lowndes, Artist, b. 1936, d. 2010, United Kingdom




Who? Historically, the field of ceramics art has been unfairly labelled as a fusty, crafty pastime – one inferior to its more cerebral siblings in sculpture and painting, and founded on the practical uses of pottery rather than museum-worthy artwork. This all changed, however, with Gillian Lowndes. Born in Cheshire in 1936, the British sculptor began her career in comparatively traditional fashion, studying at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London and for a year at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris in the 1950s. Switching from Art to Ceramics midway through her studies, she worked primarily in clay, using coiling and slabbing techniques to develop her sculptural forms.
It wasn’t until she spent a year and a half in Nigera with her partner Ian Auld, in fact, that she began to develop the radical, experimental techniques which she has since become famous for. Living with Nigeria’s Yoruba people, Lowndes was exposed to tribal art the likes of which she had never seen before, which combined materials, textures and surface decoration with a vivacity that she found irresistible. “Following her return to the UK, Lowndes began experimenting, dipping fibreglass sheets into slip and porcelain, draping this over wire skeletons, creating delicate yet visually intense sculptural forms,” writes the Centre of Ceramic Art. “She started breaking up fired ceramics, attaching pieces together, assembling montages of her own work.” This radical and quietly assured new direction helped Lowndes to establish herself as one of the most daring voices of her generation in the world of ceramics, and she maintained this role, teaching, making and exhibiting her own work until her death in 2010.

What? Lowndes’ experimental methods have posed a challenge to the world of ceramics ever since she first developed her controversial methods on return from Nigeria in the 1970s – not least through her innovative destruction and then use of found objects to create her sculptures, ranging from bricks, wire and kitchen utensils (which she would often heat to immense temperatures before incorporating their remains in her work) to bulldog clips, can openers and pliers. “The found materials [Lowndes employs] are poor, low-status ones,” Tanya Harrod wrote in the January issue of Transcending Clay Crafts; “old bricks, clinker, granite clippings, mild steel strip, cheap industrially made cups and tiles”. This presented a challenge to the stubborn orthodoxy of ceramic sculpture, which was ill at ease with Lowndes’ willingness to straddle the worlds of high and low art, and to draw attention to residual markers of the working and upper classes. This, however, was exactly her point. “It is the methods and materials that produce the ideas, not the other way round,” she told the British Council. She continued in her experiments unhindered.
The rich visual language which resulted from such a democratic approach to her materials attracted an impressive following to Lowndes’ work: many of her pieces made their way into private collections thanks to her representation by Primavera Gallery; the V&A acquired pieces from the 1960s onwards; she had a major solo exhibition with the Crafts Council in 1987 and took part in a groundbreaking exhibition entitled The Raw and the Cooked in 1993. Not only was Lowndes comfortable occupying the liminal space between fine art and ‘working class’ craftsmanship, she positively revelled in it, maintaining a defiant modesty which she is remembered for to this day.

Why? In spite of Lowndes’ radical legacy her work has gone largely uncelebrated in recent years, tucked away in private collections. This winter, however, a retrospective exhibition at London gallery The Sunday Painter – the largest presentation of her works for more than 20 years – is returning her to her well-deserved place in the limelight. “Lowndes operated on the border territory between fine art and craft, and is renowned for her sensitive investigations of material and process, of serendipity and sculptural form,” the gallery explains. “Pigeonholed by the craft establishment of the time, her work predated the expanded ceramics field of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, while her pioneering transformation of clay and found objects places her firmly in the language and discourse of sculpture, a critical context that remained closed to her in her lifetime.” Now, at last, Lowndes is receiving her dues.
Gillian Lowndes’ work is on display at The Sunday Painter until December 23, 2016.
Text by Maisie Skidmore

Laurent Petit, Artist




Artist's website link here

Wanton Zhang, Artist


Melting Landscape
High fired clay with glaze
24 x 25 x16 inches



A few more pieces by this artist below. 
Go to artsy.net to see more work. 



Whitney Plantation, Louisiana

Within the boundaries of the “Habitation Haydel”, as the Whitney Plantation was originally known, the story of the Haydel family of German immigrants and the slaves that they held were intertwined.

In 2014, the Whitney Plantation opened its doors to the public for the first time in its 262 year history as the only plantation museum in Louisiana with a focus on slavery.

Through museum exhibits, memorial artwork and restored buildings and hundreds of first-person slave narratives, visitors to Whitney will gain a unique perspective on the lives of Louisiana's enslaved people.





Field of Angels, Rod Moorhead

The field of Angels is a section of the slave memorial dedicated to 2,200 Louisiana slave children who died before their third birth date and documented in the Sacramental Records of the Archdiocese of New Orleans. Their names are engraved on granite slabs along with quotes describing their everyday life. There are no indications of death rates in the plantation inventories but further documentation from the Sacramental Records of the Archdiocese of New Orleans reveals earliness of motherhood among the enslaved women and high mortality among their children. Thirty-nine children died on this plantation from 1823 to 1863, only six reaching the age of five. The level of this death toll can be better understood when one thinks of a house where a child dies every year. Some of the children, either on this site or elsewhere, died in tragic circumstances such as drowning, epidemics, being burned or hit by lightning.

A black angel carrying a baby to Heaven is built in the middle of the field. Rod Moorhead made this bronze sculpture. The latter’s work ranges from small clay figures to large bronzes. In 1993 he started Southside Gallery in Oxford, Mississippi, and was co-owner until 1997. Among his public commissions are Concerto, a seventeen foot bronze of a violinist and cellist which stands in front of the Gertrude Ford Center for the Performing Arts at the University of Mississippi, and a life size sculpture of James Meredith for the Civil Rights Memorial also at the University of Mississippi. He has work in the Roger Ogden Collection in New Orleans, and the collection of Morgan Freeman, among others. whitneyplantation.com





The Wall of Honor is a memorial dedicated to all the people who were enslaved on the Whitney Plantation. The names and the information related to them (origin, age, skills) were retrieved from original archives and engraved on granite slabs.

So far, more than 350 slaves were identified on official records. Sexual exploitation gave an additional level of horror to the lives of enslaved women.  Every individual identified in legal records as a “mulatto” was, by definition, a product of white parentage in some measure. This occurred virtually exclusively due to slave owners impregnating their slaves.  This was a common occurrence prior to emancipation and the “relationship” between white owners and enslaved women was sometimes documented through birth records.

The couple who would become the ancestors of the African American Haydel family, Victor Theophile Haydel (1835-1924) and Marie Celeste Becnel (1840-1885) were both born on the Whitney Plantation. Victor was the son of an enslaved woman named Anna, who was herself a mulatto. Victor was fathered by Antoine Haydel, the brother of Marie Azelie Haydel, the last Haydel family member to own the Whitney. Celeste was a daughter of Francoise, the enslaved cook of Marie Azelie, and was fathered by Florestan Becnel, Marie Azelie’s brother-in-law. It is known that each of these men was married, and that refusing to engage in sexual relations with a white man was not an option available to either of these women.

Victor is the ancestor of all the black Haydels many of whom became successful entrepreneurs, educators, and politicians. One example is the Morial family which gave two mayors to New Orleans. Victor Haydel was the great grandfather of Sybil Haydel, an educator, activist, and a community leader. Sybil became the First Lady of New Orleans when her husband, Ernest N. Morial, was elected the first African-American Mayor of the Crescent City. Their son, Marc Morial, also rose to fame and was elected President of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, while serving two full terms as the mayor of New Orleans like his father. whitneyplantation.com