Kathy Butterly, Artist

Website:

https://kathybutterly.com/

 

Maya Vivas, Artist and Flagler Graduate

"Black" is comprised of a series of ceramic wall sculptures using black clay. Paralleling ideas of dissection and articulation in terms of taxidermy and the cabinet of curiosities, Black quite literally dissects, arranges & organizes representations of internal organs for your viewing pleasure. The concept of this series originates from my own hypochondriac tendencies, mixed with ideas of elegance, sensuality, & body horror. All of these concepts filtered through my own identities & the baggage that these histories carry, has lead to a body of work that is all at once alluring & repulsive. 

There is a long history throughout the world of colonization, and the use of blackness as a commodity. Everything from physical bodies to music has been forcibly made available for white consumption. Through the use of black clay and the physical act of the work being hung and available for purchase, the works make a direct connection to the slave auction, implicating the viewer as a participant in the capitalistic game of purchasing black goods. These pieces of black body are on display for one to judge, revere, gawk, ponder, and covet. The choice of using a black clay body extends far beyond aesthetics. What gives this clay its color is the high concentration of the mineral manganese. While harmless when fired, prolonged exposure to this clay dust in it’s raw from, can lead to manganese toxicity. Symptoms of which include, tremors, facial muscle spasms and difficulty walking, often preceded by psychiatric symptoms such as irritability aggressiveness and even hallucinations. Parallels can be drawn between the black experience and manganese toxicity. To have breath in a black body is a hazardous to ones health. 

/inˈtestən/

The tubular part of the digestive tract that extends from the stomach to the anus.

/ləNGs/

Two compound saccular organs that constitute the basic respiratory organ of air-breathing vertebrates.

/härt/

A hollow muscular organ that pumps the blood through the circulatory system by rhythmic contraction and dilation.

/ˈlivər/

A large  lobed glandular organ of vertebrates that secretes bile and causes important changes in many of the substances contained in the blood.

Cone 6 Porcelain & Luster, Hand built & Wheel thrown/altered, 2016, 4.5 x 3 feet

mayavivas.com

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.)

nytimes.com

Liu Chen-Chou, Artist