From March 30-April 2, the Bay area will be beset with ceramics artists when NCECA — pronounced in-seek-a, which stands for National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts — brings its annual conference to the Tampa Convention Center.
So why should you care? Well, one of the fringe benefits of NCECA's arrival is that dozens of galleries and museums on both sides of Tampa Bay have collaborated to showcase a slew of related exhibitions. And those exhibits — from big (large-scale ceramic installations at St. Pete's Museum of Fine Arts) to small (a juried exhibition of espresso cups at Tampa's Cafe Hey) — make an exhilarating case for the vitality and importance of ceramics in the context of contemporary art.
In short, a geeky conference for clay nerds has flooded Tampa Bay in one season with more cool new sculpture than we ordinarily get to see in a year. As for the conference, it's a fantastic resource for anyone interested in learning more about ceramics from technical, historical and other perspectives (check out nceca.net for details).
The NCECA Biennial at the Tampa Museum of Art, a juried show that includes work by more than 40 artists, is a great place to start your tour of NCECA-related exhibitions. Selected by a trio of preeminent figures in the ceramic arts — critic and art historian Glen R. Brown and artists Julia Galloway and Arthur Gonzalez — the works in the biennial give a state-of-the-field snapshot of the concerns and methods that occupy artists working with clay today. What's remarkable about this snapshot is that it finds artists speaking to and speaking with clay across a wide range of idioms. Some artists explicitly engage the deep history of ceramics or emphasize the materiality of clay (and its relationship to other materials like stone and fiber); others work more like conceptual artists who just happen to use clay to mine the legacy of, say, Marcel Duchamp.
Amazingly, all these idioms seem, to a certain degree, to coexist not only peacefully but quite happily in the polyglot world of ceramic arts. (At least, that's the view from the outside looking in. Maybe I'm being naïve.) In the face of so many voices — siren calls, really — I'll simply point to a few that make the biennial a must-see.
One is Shane Harris' evocative sculpture, Hers #4. There's a current in contemporary ceramic art devoted to the erotic, to glazed dildo-like shapes and vagina one-liners. Harris' work engages that conversation but transcends it, eschewing the sexual in a literal and unexamined sense for a more nuanced and unsettling exploration of sensuality. Hers #4 is a really weird little object — a ceramic cartoon strawberry painted with red glaze and poised atop a miniature, chrome-and-porcelain pedestal that resembles a bathroom fixture. Look closely, and you'll see tiny hairs emerging from a pair of holes in the piece, as well as a bright pink plastic stem that turns the round berry into a cherry.
Hers #4 is a mystery, and most of the associations and sensations the piece evokes fall into the realm of the erotic without conforming to reassuringly clichéd images of sex and pleasure. An obvious historical comparison would be Surrealist Meret Oppenheim's fur-lined teacup, the sight of which causes a viewer to imagine the sensation (at once unpleasant and titillating) of touching fur to her lips and tongue, as well as evoking the Freudian pun of sipping from a furry cup. Harris' Hers is similarly uncanny in that it invites viewers — who may look but not touch, a bit of erotically charged restraint abetted by the conventions of museum display — to imagine touching and being touched, tickled and perhaps penetrated (where, anatomically speaking, I leave to your imagination) by the sculpture.
Even the piece's title is mischievously evocative, recalling the possessive and obsessive relationships women often have with their bodies and their sex toys (in the context of which the lovingly intimate pronoun "hers" might refer to a very special g-spot stimulator or an engorged clitoris).
Lest you think I've let my perverted imagination run wild (and of course I have), let me assure you that at least some of these ideas are on Harris' mind, too. The artist began as a functional potter but progressively developed a more sculptural practice culminating in his MFA work at Indiana University at Bloomington, where he graduated in 2007. While at Bloomington, Harris connected with the famed Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction and its extensive collection of art and objects that, ahem, probe the territory of human sexuality. In fact, some of his own work — a separate series of sculptures inspired by his and his wife's experience with in vitro fertilization — now belongs to the Kinsey's collection.
This same biennial includes Clay Leonard's porcelain nesting bowls, objects more traditionally functional but no less sensuous in an entirely different way. Sleekly geometric, but in a softened, organic fashion, the bowls — one large server and four individual-sized dishes — represent the antithesis of fast food, cheap mass production culture. "Reclaiming the table" is Leonard's tagline, and it's easy to imagine his tableware exerting seductive command over that abandoned social space. Start with one of Leonard's bowls on the table, and you've already got a proposition with profound implications for all aspects of the dining cycle. It's impossible to imagine filling such a beautifully crafted vessel with anything other than tenderly prepared food (mounds of quinoa and leafy kale, perhaps) or eating from it except in the company of friends or family and the calm of uninterrupted time.
For me, this undercurrent of meaning resides in Leonard's somewhat unexpected use of porcelain. Not the ethereal, luminous porcelain that we think of as the medium's quintessence (and, by the way, several pieces in the biennial evince virtuoso manipulations of porcelain as hyper-delicate), this is hearty, slab-built porcelain. When I called Leonard to talk about his work, he referred in passing to its quality as "like butter." That's the perfect way to put it. That buttery texture, along with the bowls' soothing heft and balance, communicates a quiet kind of luxury that's all about slowing down, looking, tasting, touching and listening with care.
Finally, a word about what might be my favorite piece in the show — Josh DeWeese's Basket. It's a vase, essentially, topped with a handle that's more sculptural than functional. (It reminds me of a grasshopper or a mantis perched atop the vase.) What's especially lovely about the piece, though, are the streaks of copper, red and blue that striate its olive green-colored body. This decoration results from DeWeese dunking his pot in what amounts to local mud — a "slip glaze" in ceramic lingo, made from earth sourced near the artist's home in Bozeman, Montana — and firing it.
The site where this slip glaze comes from, called simply trail creek, is known in the ceramics community. But for the average onlooker, or for younger artists accustomed to ordering commercially-made clay and glazes over the Interwebs, DeWeese's pot is a resonant reminder that ceramic art retains its ties to the natural environment upon which it was once much more obviously dependent (way back when porcelain meant from China and so forth). His pot has terroir, as wine geeks like to say.
Or a bit of terroir — for the pot itself is made of conventionally mass-produced clay. DeWeese, who says he's no purist despite his enthusiasm for "stuff straight out of the ground," runs something called the International Wild Clay Research Project at Montana State University.
Here's to keeping the ceramic arts wild, in all senses of that word (à la "keep Austin weird"). If the diverse, chatty and delightful NCECA Biennial is any indication, they're already thriving as such.
This article appears in Mar 31 – Apr 6, 2011.