At RISD working with ceramics strummed at the rubber band that connected me to home—the place where I noticed usable clay in the dirt sides of roadcuts, where I lived in a mud house and dug my hands into the earth—where the entire context is clay.
As much as I loved RISD, it was also painful to work with clay theory and ceramics there. It strummed at the rubber band that connected me to home—the place where I noticed usable clay in the dirt sides of roadcuts, where I lived in a mud house and dug my hands into the earth to plant, to clear the fields, to cook pots and to roast food. Where I come from, the entire context is clay. But RISD also gave me opportunities like the study abroad course Clay in Japan. In Kashihara I lived with other students and worked behind a printmaking factory in a traditional ceramic studio with an anagama kiln. I wandered with my Japanese-speaking RISD buddies, intentionally getting lost and strengthening our aesthetic-appreciation muscles. But over time, I still yearned to return to my center place— to return with new eyes and find these aesthetic moments in the density of the familiar. • • • • Doing ceramics at RISD meant talking a lot about how work that’s utilitarian can’t be art. And when I was there a decade ago so many people wanted so badly to not be seen as craftspeople. They wanted to be artists, and they wanted to make work that ended up in museums. I actually did a piece once where I spent the same amount of time making a thing that hung on the wall as throwing cups that were useful—and then I tried to sell them for the same price. Nobody would pay the same price for the cups that I had spent the same amount of time on as the wall piece. That little experiment was just my own sort of investigation into that endless craft conversation, but I guess it proved a point.
previous spread: photo by Kate Russell
previous spread: River Girls (2019), photographed in situ right: Reclamation III: Rite of Passage (2019, ceramic, leather, steel, auto body filler, wood, 42 ½ x 17 x 12") was shown in Duo, my fall solo show at Jessica Silverman Gallery in San Francisco.
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// RISDXYZ
spring/summer 2020
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