The Secret Life of Objects

The Secret Life of Objects

C U R AT E D B Y PAT T I E C H A L M E R S — & — JILL FOOTE-HUTTON

NATA L I A A R B E L A E Z STEPHEN BIRD ARTHUR GONZALEZ

The Secret Life of Objects VALERIE LING LESLIE MACKLIN ANU-LAURA TUTTELBERG

N O R T H E R N C L AY C E N T E R MARCH 5 – APRIL 18, 2021

© 2021 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://www.northernclaycenter.org Manufactured in the United States First edition, 2021 International Standard Book Number 978-1-932706-57-7 Unless otherwise noted, all dimensions in inches: height precedes width precedes depth.

This activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund.

Additional funding for The Secret Life of Objects comes from Prospect Creek Foundation, Windgate Foundation, and Continental Clay Company.

THE SECRET LIFE OF OBJECTS

Introduction Quite unwittingly, as The Secret Life of Objects was conjured in early 2019, we now possess the communal personal experience to grant context to the exploration presented in this exhibition. The curators, Pattie Chalmers and Jill Foote-Hutton, offer a journey through artworks that represent a moment in time, and then offer evidence of the life we don’t typically consider. What occurred behind closed doors in the years, months, days leading up to an artwork sitting on a pedestal? What liberties are explored when the gallery lights dim at the end of the day and the works share the space only with passing headlight streams, neighborhood noise, and each other?

It would be a disservice to offer this publication without mention of the reality that it takes place in the midst of a global, life-altering, generation-forming pandemic and how all of our lives are now more “secret.”

Most have increased their level of isolation in the name of community and personal safety in health. “Behind closed doors,” defined as “taking place secretly or without public knowledge,” used to be an idea we considered separately or additionally. But now, it’s where most of our lives take place.

Even our bursts of virtual interaction, be they online meetings or social media connections, are carefully curated and staged. But they are relatively rare given the number of hours of the day spent out of view. We’ve lost our visibility in many of the ways we found familiar or recognizable. In this new world, compared to the way we used to live, if you chose to paint your legs gold, or wear micro skirts, or eat only eggs — who outside of your household would ever know? Consider the sheer volume of work, thought, emotion, and play that occurred entirely secluded from the eyes of others during the first year of the pandemic.

This past year at NCC, with limited live interactions, illuminated how much can occur, evolve, succeed, and fail outside of the purview of an audience.

Yes, this can bring with it the fresh air of freedom of movement and thought.

However, I think we’ve learned that the cost for that freedom was often invisibility. Art, and certainly humans, were not meant to be unseen. “Behind closed doors” will someday go back to being a relatively small portion of our 24-hour cycle, and exploring as such — a moment of escapism. But, for now The Secret Life of Objects validates the power of connectedness through isolation and the fantastical notions of art and storytelling that are happening, mostly unseen, around us all.

This exhibition is generously supported by our friends at the Prospect Creek Foundation, Windgate Foundation, and Continental Clay Company.

Additionally, this activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund. NCC sincerely thanks all of these supporters for making this exhibition possible and for supporting NCC and its programs. Our roster of special exhibitions in 2021 was also made possible due to the creative brainpower of the genuinely visionary, Sarah Millfelt, and she has the entire organization’s ceaseless respect.

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INSTALLATION VIEW

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fig. 1a

2020, Leslie Macklin, Cham isa Bloom, glaze, slips, clay, San Luis Valley prospected 16 x 12 x 12. fig. 1b: , Leslie Macklin, A Place to rest, 2020 . ation anim Still from video

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Dear Pattie,

Lately, I have been thinking about photographs — just regular photographs, family snapshots—that transport us to a time and place in the past, awakening our memories. They are really just vehicles, time machines if you will, aren’t they? When we take the picture, how conscious are we about why we are freezing the moment? I imagine sometimes we are aware that we are in the midst of a moment we will want to return to and sometimes we are not — just grabbing pictures, freezing moments as an act of habit or curiosity. In this time of rampant selfies, how much, no matter how deliberate, are we thinking about posterity when we freeze a moment? Regardless of our original intentions, when we look back through old photos we do awaken memories. When we look at images from previous generations — images we didn’t take, but are connected to through blood and through the absorption of oral histories passed down to us from those who were there when the moment was frozen, or at least their lives overlapped those in the image and they can tell us, “That was Grandma Nettie,” — are we grasping to understand something of ourselves that we can’t quite ever touch? All to say, it’s never really about the frozen moment is it? It’s about what that moment gins up in our imagination.

The photographs, these time machines, are often populated by objects: a coffee mug, a pillow, a car, a pair of shoes, or glasses. When we look at the frozen moment, we can recall those objects. We can sometimes feel them in our hands.

What we have been talking about is a reversal of that relationship between image and object.

Reversal.

Is that right?

I don’t know that it is, but it is some sort of variant on the theme.

I think I have always done this when I am making an object. I won’t go so far as to say that I get a fullyfledged story in my mind about an object I’m making, but I can feel the personality of the object. I can sometimes hear the tenor of the object’s voice and I do, in some way, imagine the world the object occupies.

Is this a time machine, too, or just a way to travel to another reality?

At any rate, the deliberateness of this internal storytelling became concrete for me, in my own studio practice, when I was in residency at Guldagergaard in Skælskør, Denmark. It was during a one-on-one studio visit with Richard Launder, a visiting scholar and artist. I was working on a pair of creatures in profile. They were meant to hang on a wall, and, in sharing my thinking with Launder, he began to wonder aloud about what happened on the other side of the wall. He asked me how I could let the audience know something more about what I knew about these figurines by playing with drawing on the wall as a way to activate the story for the viewer. It was such a simple and obvious thing he mentioned, but I had been blind to it on this level. Prior to this project, I had, in fact, mounted my figures on a chalkboard, releasing them to the audience to create a world around them, but there was something new in the way Launder framed it.

I think maybe he opened up a door, and in that other room, beyond the opened door, I saw the permission I needed to take control of the narrative.

Of course I’m silly, so I also started to hear a tune in my head, while I was attempting to hear all the wisdom Launder was bestowing upon me. Do you remember a children’s television program called Captain Kangaroo? I used to watch it faithfully. They ran episodes of an animated series called Simon in the Land of Chalk Drawings. The theme song went, “Well you know my name is Simon, and the things I draw come true. Oh, they take me, take me over the ladder with you.” Every show had Simon drawing on his chalkboard and eventually climbing a ladder over a fence into the world of chalk drawings.

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What is my point, Lady Chalmers? Well, first off, I don’t think I am alone in imagining the world for the objects and creatures I create. I think I believe that somewhere in the land of chalk drawings or beyond the things we make do come true. In my case though, instead of seeing the objects as frozen moments that transport me back in time, more often they are projecting me forward in time or just considering an alternate reality. What about for you? Do you think your frozen-moment vignettes are looking back or looking forward, or are they a nostalgic wish?

Either way, I did find today a doctoral dissertation on artists as storytellers. The part of the dissertation that has me most interested to read more is that the question is posed about whose story is more important, the viewer’s or the maker’s. Once I’ve had a chance to read up on it, I’ll tell you more about it, but it really is a good point isn’t it? No matter how much the artist tips their hand about the secret life of the objects they make, once they release the work into the public domain the narrative is going to shift, going to become digested by another mind and the narrative energy will transform.

Until next time dear friend, I remain sincerely yours,

Jill,

xxxxx

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fig. 2a

’t the st me, but isn Maybe it’s ju , 2021, Valer ie Ling, e u ca n’ t se it. even when yo view beautif ul x 6. , glaze, 19 x 6 Earthenware , fig. 2b: er Road , 2021 Along the Flow Valer ie Ling, 60 x 1. , pencil, 23 x Wood, acrylic

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Dear Jill,

I have been thinking about the appeal of The Secret Life of Objects. I believe my interest sparks from the stories I grew up with, stories like “The Steadfast Tin Soldier” by Hans Christian Andersen, about a tin soldier in love with a paper ballerina, or the poem, “The Duel,” by Eugene Field where the Gingham Dog and the Calico Cat battle to obliteration in the night. These stories and others fuel my imagination about the objects with which we live. I fancy these things having private existences that are resistant to our direct view, a secret life in the night, in the cupboard, or in the kiln.

To suspend disbelief for just a moment and allow oneself the freedom to believe in possibilities beyond our own experience is, for me, a moment of joy. After all, in the example of a kiln, things do happen when the door is closed: a piece bends to kiss its neighbor and is caught in that moment, another transforms from blushing to blue, and a third cracks open in a toothless smile. The imagined rivalry between the sculptures of Stephen Bird in his video “What Are You Laughing At?” illustrates this notion perfectly. In animating his sculptures, Bird bestows them not only with movement but also emotion. In watching the video, we are invited to witness a hidden interaction between his clay characters in a kiln, the depiction providing a new narrative framework to experience the sculptures.

I agree with you Jilly, when you describe the power of photographs (and I would also add old videos and films) to transport us to another moment. As you wrote, they function as a sort of time machine, as do the objects revealed in them and the objects themselves. I often think about how ordinary objects as banal as a wooden spoon or a pair of socks can become sparks for remembrances. Taking us, often unexpectedly, on a trip in Mr. Peabody’s Wayback Machine,* (A further reference to an archaic cartoon), to visit our pasts.

It is interesting to me how these conduits to memory have the added complexity that in some instances they are cherished personal mementos, while other times, they are merely chanced upon articles that stir a recollection in the way the scent of smoke on a winter walk can transport one to another time and place.

I think there is a magic to how things can be charged with the cues of such a variety of experiences; maybe this is the reason we see a plethora of magical objects in literature and film, from enchanted beans, to talking mirrors, to flying carpets. I am captivated by the significance objects can have in storytelling.

I remember from an Alfred Hitchcock film studies class I took in graduate school learning about “the MacGuffin” — something, often an object, that is necessary to move the plot forward, but is insignificant in itself, as the bottles of uranium in Hitchcock’s film Notorious or a more familiar example would be the holy grail in Arthurian Legend.

I grew up reading stories that exist in a narrative genre I have recently heard called portal fiction.

(I would suspect that Simon passing into his chalkboard world would fit into this category of fiction.) As a kid, these stories took me to places where anything could happen — climb through a looking glass, or into a wardrobe, or put on a colored ring, and you arrive at entirely new realities. There is a magic in imagining these alternate locations, a way of removing oneself, at least in part, from this reality while knowing that to return is to be better for the experience of being away.

I often consider how much meaning an object can hold. At times they seem almost overloaded with cues to memories of moments, people, and places. When I think about them in this way, there seems to be no question of an object’s ability to exist outside its original function or intention. This surplus meaning is a power I frequently identify in even mundane objects. When an object is connected either intentionally or not to a memory, it can provide a gateway to an expanded experience. This is true of the objects depicted

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in the artwork of Arthur Gonzalez. The things he reproduces in his work provide a pathway to recollection that reaches deep into our memories; in rendering books or stumps or flames, for example, he is able to give the viewer hints to his narrative intent and establishes them as powerful signifiers. Furthermore, when he depicts his clay pieces as images or sculpts his drawings, he adds another level of play, each one a reflection of the other, each adding value to the other — a perfect ouroboros of expression.

When I further consider your description of looking at photographs, it occurs to me that you are revealing yourself as a kind of detective. I, too, look at these images and derive what I can from what I see and compile it with what I know to create a story, partly true and partly of my own imaginings. This tendency for decoding might have its roots in art history class, deciphering the symbols in a van Eyck painting, or perhaps in high school English class, writing essays explaining the metaphor of the flowers in a Thomas Hardy novel or possibly even earlier while trying to detect the murderer in the Sunday Mystery Movie with my family. Still, wherever the impulse originates, the reading of an image or deriving meaning from the description of an object pleases me.

If I think of the objects in photographs as clues to events, the objects themselves become evidence and artifacts of the past. I imagine historians, museologists, and archeologists gathering and displaying the objects that confirm the true story of our past, and I relish the idea that an object that is dug up or handed down can act as a talisman or artifact for a larger narrative. In this way, the photographs of Natalia Arbelaez, for me, represent a dance with antiquity: presenting cultural, historical, and anthropological contexts for her “contemporary artifacts.” In marrying her clay objects to personal narrative and cultural reflection through images, she expands the aura of her ceramic vessels, enriching the viewing experience.

You know, Jill, when you write of the reversal of the relationship between image and object, my interest is piqued. Which comes first? Is the image evidence of the artifact, or does the artifact prove the truth of the image? I am uncertain, and that is a dance with ambiguity that I am prepared to do. And is perhaps at least partly the appeal for me of the work in The Secret Life of Objects, the objects and the images existing in a place of thoughtful play. I think Anu-Laura Tuttelberg’s work resides within this ambiguity. Her ceramic pieces must exist to create her films, but when the ceramic birds and insects from Winter in Rainforest are viewed as sculpture, they seem to me to exist as souvenirs of the narrative, and therefore have the association of coming after. I am unsure if this is what you meant by reversal, but it has me thinking about the relation of the work to the idea of original.

I am also curious to consider your question about what happens behind the wall. My first thought is that it seems to connect to what I have been writing about and the unseen. What happens behind the wall?

In the cabinet? In the kiln? The question could be simple or complex, and so could the answer. I can’t say I have an answer; it may be something I will need to mull over for some time. I am not sure if I have ever really thought about what is happening behind the wall in my own work, but I do think of what is happening outside an imagined frame. Maybe that is the same thing, but it somehow seems different, at least at present.

I hope this all makes sense, Let’s talk soon,

xo Pattie

* From “Peabody’s Improbable History”, a recurring feature of the 1960s cartoon series The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show.

The Wayback Machine is a plot device used to transport the characters, Mr. Peabody and Sherman, back in time to visit important events in human history.

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Dear Pattie,

You make perfectly perfect sense to me, although I did have to look up portal fiction to learn a bit more about it.

As I read the titles you mentioned, I thought, “Oh yes, I love those too.” Of course, once I saw the genre’s specific definition it was abundantly plain — I have definitely been a fan for a while. The full trope of portal fiction seems to include the need for the protagonist to impact the realm they are traveling through in some important way. Reading this, I became stuck on how the ego of the maker is tied up in the secret lives of the objects they make. I am always caught off guard when ego appears, seemingly out of nowhere, inserting itself wherever it likes. (The Secret Lives of Egos from a Naive Perspective should be the title of my next graphic novel.)

But, I shouldn’t be surprised.

It is a very natural thing that we create to exert some power over our world. Processing the world we live in through the creation of objects is indeed a sort of control, no? Hopefully, this doesn’t sound like harsh judgment. It is only that I often think of the escape aspect of the alternate universe—with cigarette trees and lemonade springs in the big rock candy mountain.

Perhaps I am thinking about ego and control because the dissertation I wrote you about has me considering who is in charge of these secret lives of objects. The paper is a study of 19th century American visual culture.

The author, Catherine H. Walsh, in her examination of narrative art, considers the stories exchanged in front of the art once it is on display — by the viewers! She finds valuable social and cultural cues in those conversations, and thinks the powers that be (galleries, museums, curators, etc.) have been remiss in not working harder to capture those narratives. She is looking at American art and considering the oral tradition of storytelling in America. Although, I don’t think one can say that oral traditions are uniquely American, do you? I suppose the line had to be drawn somewhere in her studies. At any rate, what I enjoyed about her writing was the way she looked at works that captured scenes of storytelling. The images were made for a populace that was used to reading images and familiar with the practice of sharing histories orally and aurally. She points out that the works were asking the viewer to create layers of narrative.

She also points out that the artist, and this part I have to quote her directly or I’ll misrepresent Walsh’s intention, “[The artist] paints a story about stories and the process of telling them, self-consciously posing as an authorial presence and providing an opportunity for the critical viewer to think about ways in which narrative works, visually, orally, and textually.”

Certainly, in the 21st century, I think it almost goes without saying that artists are savvy enough to know the work they make, whatever it was inspired by, however much they load it with cues (as you say), will eventually be left alone to be interpreted by a viewer. Yes, that could go without saying, but I say it because I think it is very interesting to think about the shifting power of the narrative.

My mind is whirling toward you,

Jill

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fig. 3a

lis ts , 2012 , , Pa ir of Pugi er, Stephen Bird enamel , lust nware, glaze, White earthe .5 x 12 x 8. x 7.5 , right: 29 lef t: 26 x 10

?, fig. 3b: u laug hi ng at , What are yo Stephen Bird n. io imat om video an 2010, Still fr

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fig. 4a

Natalia Arbela ez , El Dorado Figu re/Per fo 2019 , Digital rm ance , Archival Pr in t 1/9 , 36 x 24 x 2. fig. 4b: Natalia Arbela ez , Colombian Double St ir ru 2021, Terracot p #1 , ta .

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Dear Jilly, Thanks for your thoughtful response. I am not sure if I share the opinion about the protagonist needing to impact the realm in which they are travelling, or at least I should say I never really thought about it in this way. I have always seen the purpose of the journey is to make a major impact on the protagonist. But perhaps this ends up being the same thing in the end. I am also curious about how you are thinking about ego. Is it in Freudian terms, (id, ego, superego)? Or something else? The maker as ego? Is the mark of the hand then the mark of the ego? I would say yes in that it points to an individual, but not as it might suggest if ego is viewed as a reference to vanity.

Creation to gain power? I am not very optimistic about having power over any world; ceramics reminds me daily of its power over me. An escape to another reality as a respite as you suggest, perhaps, more so than control? I like the big rock candy mountain reference; it reminds me of the game “Candyland,” with all the appeal of the “ice cream floats” with their Neapolitan blocks and the bubbling “molasses swamp” as you enter the home stretch.

What you write has me rethinking the idea of authorship. Walsh’s point referring to the artists as “painting a story about stories” is something I have reflected on, but more in the sense of improv. Perhaps what an artist creates is the “yes and…” that allows an expanded creation. But perhaps, as it is for me, the “stories exchanged in front of art” are as relevant as anything the artist intended although not more, for I don’t wholly relinquish what I would consider my version of the narrative when I make work (I hang on with things like titles and specific details narrow the possibilities), and when I experience an artwork in my acknowledgment of the maker, I do try to understand the artistic intent. I am persuaded by the philosopher Jacques Derrida when he suggested that nothing is outside the text, and by Norman Bryson, who suggests that although the original meaning of a work is privileged, we each bring meaning to it, resulting in a multitude of possible readings. I have found this is true for myself, even in my own work. And I have discovered different meanings as I change over time, even as the work doesn’t.

When I think about storytelling and how you describe the tradition, I am reminded of Marshall McLuhan’s book, The Medium is the Message. It has been a while, but my recollection is that the story we are telling is equaled in importance by the medium we use to tell it. That is definitely overly simplified; I will have to pull out that book again and refresh my memory. But it is for certain tied to the transition from oral to written or visual culture and then back to an oral culture.

In the meantime, I am excited about the arrival of a new book called The Tears of Things: Melancholy and Physical Objects by Peter Schwenger. The excerpt has given me food for thought about how we think about objects. But I will leave this for now and hope you can untangle some of my thoughts.

Be well, stay safe,

Xo p

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Dear Pattie,

In what is fast becoming an overwhelming conglomeration of ideas, I’m still processing Walsh’s examination of the narrative. Her thesis has thrust the reality of the multiplicity of narratives to the center stage of my brain and you, well, I think you have ripped its clothes off. My speculations about where narratives originate and terminate are now intertwined with what you wrote about how the simple everyday object may evoke memory. But my friend, it gets worse.

Maybe it gets better? Richer?

We have asked artists into this exhibition to willingly grant access to otherwise privileged meaning, as Bryson aptly names it. They have imagined an arc of history for the objects they have created. This is the “ego” I was referring to in my earlier conveyance. You asked for clarity, here it is. Isn’t creation a selfimportant act on some level, especially when the maker wants to direct the narrative about the object or image? Maybe the absolution for self-importance is this: we extend Bryson’s notion and conclude that the multiple meanings conferred on any given art object is how any given artist may find order in their own reality. What do you think? Once we have the objects and their histories in one room — our assembled anthology — and are able to consider them individually and as a collective story about storytelling what…

What is the opposite of Bryson’s privileged point? It isn’t unprivileged, is it?

I can’t quite put my finger on the appropriate word, but I think I might be dreaming a Derridean dream about catching stories that can’t be caught in words. Imagining that somehow, amongst the barrage of narratives that have been and will be generated within The Secret Life of Objects, stories WILL be caught, if only for a fleeting moment.

Well Pattie, it has all become a whirlwind in my brain, and I want to be able to gather up all the stories and save them in some tangible way, but if I did, if we did, they might die. Like a firefly caught in a bell jar and never released, capturing them permanently would end the magic.

And yet, I can’t help but indulge my wonder.

What will Leslie Macklin pull from the viewers’ memories when she puts her Alpine Vessel Series in front of them? What stories will they conjure as the relationship between land, body, and object plays out on a loop before them? Her research is rooted in the consideration of objects born from and for domestic spaces, but in her growth as a maker, she has allowed “domestic space” to evolve to include any space that is occupied at any time. She has, in past work, referred to specific spaces by the replicating objects found in the landscape. Now she is creating vessels from the earth of these landscapes. As she examines the relationship between object, place, and person, the world opens up for her and her audience — we travel beyond any one of these ideas. We will certainly travel beyond her original ideas of domesticity. Any viewer who has traveled west, or dreamed of doing so, will bring their own narrative to blend with the story she is intentionally — vaguely — suggesting. Standing in the presence of her vessel, the audience will breathe with her as they watch the digital vessel disappear and reappear on screen. Is this a story they will tell, or is this a story they will feel?

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Yes, my imagination wants to be all encompassing, and it is difficult to repress the urge to plan the gathering of stories harvested from engagements with the exhibition to send back to the artists. How would the objects they have been creating change if they considered the viewers’ interpretive narration? Do they, like you, like I do, hang on to control of the narrative too much to shift in the face of inserted narratives from an external source? To go back to Derrida, considering his theories of deconstruction, it’s exciting to acknowledge the value of the artists’ intended narratives, the audience narratives, and the narratives born of looking at all of these stories in conversation with each other in a confined space. Such musing as this has me wondering about the story you mentioned earlier in our correspondence, “The Duel.” Tell me, when you read about the Gingham Dog and the Calico Cat, did you create another story for them? Did you imagine what made them loathe each other so much, or did you just accept that dogs and cats should not mix? Did you accept the ending of “The Duel,” that they ate each other up, or did you imagine they reconciled and ran off together? It seems to me that the author leaves the door open a little for some other thing to have happened to the Gingham Dog and the Calico Cat when he suggests there are conflicting oral histories about them, “And some folks think unto this day, that burglars stole that pair away!”

Of course, as I consider the wondrous possibilities of multiple narrative arcs that never come down from their crescendo, I am simultaneously weighing the point from your most recent letter about how objects can “confirm ‘the truth’ of our past” and how objects act as “talisman or artifact for a larger narrative.” Pattie, The Secret Life of Objects, was never really about the objects at all, was it?

Will you find it crass or too literal if I write my meaning out more plainly?

The point is never about the story or the object, is it? It’s always about the storyteller, whomever that turns out to be. Case in point, Natalia Arbelaez reconstructs a story of herself through imagined and created artifacts in her series Passages of Absence. Her personal history includes the story of familial immigration, which is a leaving-and-arriving story, a-letting-go-and-remembering-while-observingwith-selective-embrace story. Her personal history also includes the very American tale of being a latchkey kid who supped on cartoons after school. The resulting mix has brought objects into this world that are hybrid artifacts of both pre-Columbian and Hanna-Barbera origins — an autobiography touched by history and magical realism in equal measure. Her objects (artifacts) have the potential to unlock the sacred plane while simultaneously grounding us in the profane, and they hold true to one of the beautiful attributes of magical realism — unclear boundaries illuminate perspectives that are missing. Can she, in telling her invisible and unheard story, amplify invisible and unheard stories in the viewer?

I’m eager to hear about what you find that sparks your imagination in The Tears of Things: Melancholy and Physical Objects. I have been delving into The Secret Life of Puppets by Victoria Nelson, because in it she explores constructed realities, and I am interested to see how her research aligns with the realities that will be constructed in this exhibition. She proposes that, by constructing new realities, we are filling voids that have been created as the world becomes more secular and we (the societal “we”) turn to art, in all its modalities, to revive ancient themes.

Warmly, your co-conspirator,

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qqqq

Jill

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fig. 5a

Anu-Laura Tu ttelberg, Clos e, 2019 , Porcela semi porcelain in , , wire, wood , silicone, roots, fiber, moss, co wool , tton thread , pa per clay, 13 x 11 x 5. fig. 5b: Anu-Laura Tu ttelberg, W in ter in the Ra 2019 , Still fro in forest , m video anim ation.

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Dearest Jill,

What we have here is a many-layered cake; I hope you don’t feel that I licked all the icing off of your piece.

After reading your message, I worry that I need to offer you a robe. With that in mind, could the notion of memory be separated from the narrative? Maybe it is at the confluence of memory and narrative that meaning is derived — narratives based on reflections and sparked by the aura of an object.(?)

When I contemplate The Secret Life of Objects, I am caught up in the idea of the secret. I don’t know if the work in the exhibition gives up all of its secrets when paired with the non-clay work; for me, the added information can at times create an even more seductive riddle. Valerie Ling’s photographed groupings of her sculptures is a case in point. The images give me some context, but I still know very little of what they are about. Who are they? What are they doing? Can I join in? I believe there is a place of greater privilege that is accessed through the addition of drawings, photographs, and videos to the work, but sometimes more information is only part of improved understanding. Yes, there is access through the expanded information to a privileged kind of play, but there also remains a delicious ambiguity in the sharing of this work that results in more unanswered questions, and the emerging uncertainty allows space for the viewer to explore the work from their own point of view.

I think there is a truth to what you say about the demise of stories caught in a bell jar. There is something organic about experiencing meaning for oneself that can become stiff or stagnant when it is forced away from its origins. Perhaps it is neutered by self-consciousness? Or is it only my anxiety of having my innermost workings revealed that makes me feel the sense of pruning?

When I consider the work in the exhibition together, I reflect on the influence of one thing upon another, like the individual objects on a curio shelf becoming linked through proximity. Here I consider the writings of Derrida again — the notion that there is no one true meaning — that there is only play and a constant deferral of meaning. I think of a passage written by Jeanette Winterson in Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit when she ponders the idea of history: Some people say there are true things to be found, some people say all kinds of things can be proved.

I don’t believe them. The only thing for certain is how complicated it all is, like a string full of knots.

It’s all there but hard to find the beginning and impossible to fathom the end. The best you can do is admire the cat’s cradle, and maybe knot it up a bit more.* I wonder about the sense in trying to ascertain the truth; so many things are never answered, and so I don’t find it hard at all to allow for multiple answers. And so yes, dear Jill, the Cat and the Dog may have consumed each other or run off together, maybe they even did both?

As a viewer, I see the value in understanding the context of a maker’s approach; does it make me understand the work better? Maybe, but does it make me enjoy the work more? Or just differently? It is clear to me that discussing these ideas with you has given me a lot to think about. I have had to re-establish what I believe and expand how I think about experiencing objects and narrative. I am definitely interested in exploring more of the texts you refer to. I hope this conversation will continue, but that we never come to a concrete understanding.

Best wishes, with respect,

Pattie

* Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Heinemann New Windmills: London, 1991. Page 85.

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fig. 6a

Arthur Gonzalez, The Trees Will Sway ic, and The Bones Will Break , 2020, Ceram 3. x 12 x 12 el, chipboard, enam

fig. 6b: Will Sway and Arthur Gonzalez, Study for "The Trees of ARTFORUM ite Graph 2018, #1, " Break The Bones Will 11 x 11.

10, No. 51 Vol. ; paper cover zine maga

NO R T H E R N C L AY C E N T E R

Artist Biographies Anu-Laura Tuttelberg

Arthur Gonzalez

Natalia Arbelaez

When one reads about ceramic material, and the objects made from it, inevitably one will read about plasticity and how fire enables the maker to archive a moment of fluidity or touch.

The elongated neck of a crane holds muscular tension. A hybrid hand-claw is pulled up toward a downy chest about to step forward. Grace of movement is captured, locked in time,

by Anu-Laura Tuttelberg’s delicate characters. Her static sculptures have already unlocked our imagination, allowing stories to wander out of our subconsciousness.

And then — she animates the porcelain portraits. We don’t have to imagine them moving.

She reveals their plasticity anew, frame by frame, in her process.

She shares the narrative, the secret lives of these creatures, with the element of time.

“Dark, somber and foreboding, Arthur Gonzalez’s works encourage serious deliberation and reflection on the relationship between personal concerns and world issues. Raw in form, lacking in smoothness, and rough in finish, the ceramic sculptures give glimpses of a conversation or a contemplation in progress. Gonzalez’s creations of ceramic and found objects reveal visions and feelings that are not polished but ongoing processes of gyrating thoughts and churning emotions that threaten to erupt into reality and consciousness to defy the fantasy of a peaceful experience.

A primordial story is reclaimed with defiant pride. We are confronted by a golden god born of ancient and modern stories—from a culture history tried to swallow. We pick up clues about the civilization Natalia Arbelaez is rebuilding, reimagining, and preserving one object at a time. This is our opportunity to acknowledge the story is not a tale of a lost culture. She invites us to stand in a distant history and witness how it is existing today.

Influenced by the magical realism of renowned author Gabriel García Márquez she combines, “research, familial narratives, and cartoon embellishments to create surreal stories as a way to … autobiographically narrate history.”

Now the process of story is given over to the viewer, “We [artists] are to sense, to study, to process, and to reflect the surrounding and then to give it a form that touches the viewer and makes them want to notice and participate in the process.”

Tuttelberg works as a freelance artist directing stop-motion films and creating sculptures for exhibitions. Winter in the Rainforest premiered at the prestigious Annecy International Animation Film Festival in June 2019. The project received the Best Project prize at Baltic Pitching Forum in Vilnius, Lithuania in October 2015 and was selected to participate at European Short Film Co-production Forum Euroconnection as part of 38th Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival in France in February 2016. The film is a coproduction with Estonia, Mexico, and Lithuania.

“Three distinct phases have influenced the direction of Gonzalez’s artistic career and expression. First, as a graduate student, at the University of California, Davis, under Robert Arneson and Manuel Neri, he entered the MFA program as a figurative sculptor during the late 1970s after completing an MA in painting at California State University, Sacramento. His second phase was as an artist in residence at the University of Georgia, Athens, from 1981 to 1982. Gonzalez’s attitudes towards art changed through his exposure to a creative lifestyle that blended music and visual art. The third phase of Gonzalez’s career was through his involvement in the early 1980s East Village art scene, in New York City, which fastforwarded public recognition of his work.” Currently Gonzalez is a professor at California College of the Arts, Oakland.

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Arbelaez is a ColombianAmerican artist, born and raised in Miami, Florida to immigrant parents. There she received her BFA from Florida International University. Her MFA is from The Ohio State University, Athens. She has been a resident artist at the Clay Art Center in Port Chester, New York; Watershed in Newcastle, Maine; Harvard University; and the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City. Her work has been exhibited nationally in museums and galleries, and is included in various collections, such as the Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, New York, and The Frederik Meijer Gardens, Grand Rapids, Michigan. She was recognized by the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts (NCECA) as a 2018 Emerging Artist in the field.

She continues to research the work of historical and influential women ceramists of color.

THE SECRET LIFE OF OBJECTS

Leslie Macklin

Stephen Bird

Valerie Ling

In 1990, Tom Robbins’s Skinny Legs and All was published.

A tale carried in part by inanimate protagonists: a can o’ beans, a conch shell, a painted stick, a spoon, and a dirty sock—pilgrims heading to Jerusalem. Leslie Macklin’s work perambulates along a similar road, in that she trains the viewer’s eye on an object, in this case a vessel, to shift our gaze so we might better understand a story about place.

This unconventional approach shifts our gaze to a perspective we might overlook if we remained attached to our own vantage point. Unlike Robbins, Macklin is communicating her story through material, time, and sound. She is not restrained with verbal description.

Macklin’s vessels, her inanimate protagonists, are made of the landscape they stand before in the gallery. Her objects have journeyed far to tell us about the place they come from.

Macklin is inviting us, “Reflect on your surroundings, consider the history and change of your specific landscape, and engage with the work by evaluating your impact on the world.”

Stephen Bird tells us, “I use relationships of surface, form, color, line, and mark making, (the mainstays of the painter’s vocabulary) to create narratives which explore transgressive themes such as cruelty, war, natural disasters, unnatural affections and violent deaths.

Using visual metaphors, scale, random inclusions, and simultaneous juxtapositions, I reinterpret old myths and appropriate iconography from established English pottery traditions: a stiff pastoral scene from Spode, a decorative Royal Doulton tile, or the cabbage leaf from a Wedgwood Whieldon teapot. I believe visual art is all about humanity’s relationship to objects, and I wish, above all, to invoke the emotional connections that are felt towards things that have been made by hand with love.”

Valerie Ling presents a question of perception, “Reality is embellished by imagination and is void of societal boundaries and judgment.”

Macklin is an assistant professor of ceramics at Adams State University, Alamosa, Colorado.

She received her MFA in Ceramics at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, New Bedford. Her professional activities include a national lecture and exhibition record.

She was a 2019 recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts $10,000 Challenge Grant in support of a new social-practice residency grant. In 2012, she started Fire Factory, a custom ceramic fabrication shop that has fulfilled commissions for the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts, and the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, Washington, DC.

Born in Stoke-on-Trent, England, Bird has lived in Australia since 1999. He trained at The Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design, Dundee, Scotland, where he studied painting. He remains aloof from any artist pigeonhole. Bird’s work is exhibited both nationally and internationally, including the 2017 Gyeonggi Biennale – South Korea, the Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne, Australia, the National Museum, Oslo, Norway, and Garis+Hahn, New York. His works are held in the public collections of the National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh, The National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, the National Museums Northern Ireland, and the Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide. Bird is also the recipient of many prizes, winning the Gold Coast International Ceramic Art Award in 2016.

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Perception is the ability to see, hear, or become aware of something through the senses.

Perception is the bedrock upon which we build stories in our mind about our reality. Ling’s figures give visible form to the perception of a child. Childhood can be easily accessible, may be highly loaded, but without fail is a universal experience.

Standing before her figures, the viewer has choose-your-ownadventure options—will you be the child, will you be a parent, will you be a coolly-removed observer? Will you remember a parallel experience, or will you submit and slip into the avatar Ling has presented? Whatever role a viewer chooses to engage as they digest her pop-colored world, inevitably they will have to have an honest reckoning about their perception of reality, “Innocence is momentary and eventually falls away like flower petals.”

Ling received her BFA from the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University in 2015. She was a resident artist and Anonymous Artist Studio Fellow at Northern Clay Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota from 2016 to 2017. Since her residency she has been using her ability to stage a narrative in a commercial photography studio in West Islip, New York.

NO R T H E R N C L AY C E N T E R

Northern Clay Center Northern Clay Center’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 the public’s appreciation and understanding of the ceramic arts.

Staff Kyle Rudy-Kohlhepp, Executive Director Tippy Maurant, Deputy Director/Director of Galleries & Exhibitions Jordan Bongaarts, Exhibition Associate Board of Directors Paul Vahle, Chair Amanda Kay Anderson Bryan Anderson Nan Arundel Mary K. Baumann Craig Bishop Heather Nameth Bren Evelyn Weil Browne Nettie Colón

Sydney Crowder Nancy Hanily-Dolan Patrick Kennedy Mark Lellman Kate Maury Brad Meier Philip Mische Debbie Schumer Rick Scott

Honorary Directors Kay Erickson Legacy Directors Andy Boss Warren MacKenzie Joan Mondale

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

2424 Franklin Avenue East Minneapolis, Minnesota 55406 612.339.8007 www.northernclaycenter.org