The audio file for this article was produced by the Ceramic Arts Network staff and not read by the author.
For more than twenty-five years, Brian Boldon—among the earliest artists to apply computer-aided design and manufacturing (CAD/CAM) technologies to the creation of ceramic art—has been acutely aware of the precarious position of those technologies between the benefits of advanced tools and the potential dangers of ceding the shaping and expression of human experience to mechanical devices and ersatz minds. Consequently, Boldon has situated himself consciously, dutifully at the heart of his art even when evidence of the hand has been absent and the look of technology—tomographic imaging, bit-mapping, Photoshop editing—has been stylistically prominent. This has held true throughout a career that has shifted from the studio to the spaces of public art and, recently, back to the studio again; true throughout an oeuvre that has spanned the spectrum of style from minutely detailed representation to non-objective expressionism; and true as Boldon has moved away from large-scale wall-mounted planar and relief works toward small-scale sculpture in the round.
New Collaborative Possibilities
In 2008, after eighteen years in academia and nine years of working with CAD/CAM technology, Boldon quit his position as a professor at Michigan State University in East Lansing, Michigan, to pursue the collaborative enterprise In Plain Sight Art full-time, which he co-founded in 2002 with his artist spouse, Amy Baur. After meeting with European innovators of a laser-printing process for producing full-color decals in glazes, Boldon purchased the necessary equipment and began exploring possibilities. “Our first idea,” he recalls, “was to use digital files in a panel system where you had a piece that was maybe 10 by 30 feet (3 × 9.1 m) and you divided it into whatever your style format was. We were printing multiple files, transferring them onto tiles, and then piecing them together in the installation process.”
Commissioned projects from the first phase of In Plain Sight Art’s collaborative work, such as What Was Once Imagined, a 40-foot (12.2-m) montage of images created for Catholic Charities of Minneapolis and St. Paul’s downtown St. Paul Homeless Shelter, were essentially murals on architectural tiles. “Instead of thinking about public art as a way to decorate a building or create an image that’s stuck on a wall,” Boldon says, “we were using architectural materials and a new technology to integrate with the architectural language.” In the second phase of the roughly 60 public projects completed by In Plain Sight Art to date, Boldon and Baur have increasingly exploited three-dimensionality. For example, the 2021 project From Idea to Practice, commissioned by the Louisiana Percent for Art program for the Engineering Sciences Building at Southeastern Louisiana University, combines a montage-decorated tile panel with relief elements of 3D-printed, glazed porcelain, kiln-formed glass, and stainless steel.
Back to the Roots
In 2022, tragedy struck Boldon and Baur, leading to a reassessment of life priorities and a move from urban Minneapolis to northwest Wisconsin. “The first thing I wanted to do was to just go back to my roots,” Boldon explains. “I remember very clearly as an undergraduate when I first got my twin lens reflex Mamiya camera. I just stopped drawing and painting. It wasn’t really a conscious choice. I just went toward photography. When they were able to put ceramic pigments through laser printers, my work became printmaking. I just re-evaluated all that and went back to my roots. I went out observationally, out into the landscape, and re-explored what it was like to not use a camera to capture things. For seven months, I just drew and painted. They weren’t very good pieces, but they were a way for me to reset the whole relationship with where I start creatively.”
Among the aspirations of Boldon’s new work was a more obtrusive three-dimensionality, pursued first in a series of non-ceramic wall pieces incorporating 3D-printed nylon cones, rings, cylinders, and parabolic forms held together in “thickets” of stainless-steel rods vaguely suggestive of open-weave fabrics. The three-dimensional maximalism of that series reflected a deliberate reversal of focus from the inner experience of rational reflection to an external, more immediately experiential relationship with the natural world. The next step was to translate the openness and translucence of the non-ceramic assemblages to the format of intimately scaled freestanding ceramic sculpture, an objective accomplished by employing clay in highly interpretive abstractions that referenced landscapes. “I’m not a plein-air painter trying to paint what I see,” Boldon says, “and it’s not about all the things that we know. I’ve been inspired by science my whole career. I could think of nothing more interesting than seeing a scientific image of a raindrop and then trying to print it in a glaze and put it on a tile. So, this was in many ways my reboot. To make this work was to say, I don’t care about science anymore. I just don’t care. All I really care about is whether this piece feels right. The only criterion was, does it feel like it’s a part of what’s out there?”
Holding Space
What’s out there is a dynamic nature: an unending cycle of ephemeralities, the wheel of life rotating above and in tandem with the continuous and universal entropy of matter and energy. To embrace that nature, as opposed to seeking control over it, required acceptance of change and loss as fundamental necessities. For Boldon, part of that acceptance involved adopting a more spontaneous, riskier approach to making which would open for him a new avenue to creativity after fifteen years of adhering to a routine of designing and pitching proposals before producing anything concrete. The new sculptures, in contrast, are drawn to the antithesis of concreteness. “They’re trying to hold space,” he explains, “and that’s really uncertain in a medium with all of the limitations of clay: gravity, structure, balance, and slumping in the kiln—all the problems you have with clay. It’s a fluid material throughout its entire process until, finally, you let go of it. I don’t want to lose any of that. I want it to feel like that’s still going on, still happening, even though the forms are physically static.”
That goal was conducive to an exploration of techniques less controllable than CAD/CAM production, opening for Boldon’s work a greater opportunity for the combination of serendipity and natural forces to influence outcomes. In works such as Dense Coupling, for example, the two pale blue ellipses forming an abstract sky above a convoluted field were poured from slip; likewise, the ox-blood circles set at right angles to one another. The rest of the forms, primarily porcelain hoops, were CAD/CAM generated, but they reflect a new conception of the 3D-printer as a “drawing tool” employed to add gesture to structure. “It was,” Boldon says, “like a printmaking transfer process: print a shape, a flat line drawing, onto a thin sheet of plastic; then flip it wet onto a slab and let it stiffen up. I had to get the timing right. I’d fire them, then go back and nest them into these volumes that I’d drawn, the printed and assembled things, then fuse them into place at cone 04 with a clear glaze. There was no map for how to make the assemblages. It was a discoverable process, just like being in the landscape. I took what I learned outside and just brought it into the studio.”
A Discovery Process
With a broad concept of drawing at their conceptual cores and a tendentious focus on three-dimensionality shaping their forms, the new sculptures offer the kinds of visual surprises inherent in what the abstract-expressionist David Smith called “drawings in space”—that is, such works as Boldon’s Perimeter Kinship are the contraries of gestalts. Far from being conceptually graspable from a single viewpoint, they are in effect composites of multiple compositions, each only accessible from a different angle. From one, Perimeter Kinship seems a zoomorphic abstraction: a fanciful linear evocation of a low-profile dinosaur or a duck-billed platypus. From another, representation gives way to pure non-objectivity in a spinning configuration of circles. From a third, a concentration of snarled lines teases at some cryptic content contained in illegible calligraphic messages. From a fourth, a surreal landscape positions a molten-disc sun, hollow at its core, beside a floating bubble in which a purple flower is inexplicably suspended. In the end, of course, the point is that the works cannot be adequately experienced without approaching them through the same experiential strategies as those demanded by the real world, by nature as a constantly changing complexity only imperfectly grasped not only in space, but also across time—the time it takes to move among and around things.
In this respect, Boldon’s new works are microcosms to be explored. “They’re self-sustaining,” he asserts. “In many ways, they’re their own private existence. What links them all together is the haptic approach to a discovery process; I didn’t labor over them. They just sprang from me fully formed. It was a very exciting experience.”
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The audio file for this article was produced by the Ceramic Arts Network staff and not read by the author.
For more than twenty-five years, Brian Boldon—among the earliest artists to apply computer-aided design and manufacturing (CAD/CAM) technologies to the creation of ceramic art—has been acutely aware of the precarious position of those technologies between the benefits of advanced tools and the potential dangers of ceding the shaping and expression of human experience to mechanical devices and ersatz minds. Consequently, Boldon has situated himself consciously, dutifully at the heart of his art even when evidence of the hand has been absent and the look of technology—tomographic imaging, bit-mapping, Photoshop editing—has been stylistically prominent. This has held true throughout a career that has shifted from the studio to the spaces of public art and, recently, back to the studio again; true throughout an oeuvre that has spanned the spectrum of style from minutely detailed representation to non-objective expressionism; and true as Boldon has moved away from large-scale wall-mounted planar and relief works toward small-scale sculpture in the round.
New Collaborative Possibilities
In 2008, after eighteen years in academia and nine years of working with CAD/CAM technology, Boldon quit his position as a professor at Michigan State University in East Lansing, Michigan, to pursue the collaborative enterprise In Plain Sight Art full-time, which he co-founded in 2002 with his artist spouse, Amy Baur. After meeting with European innovators of a laser-printing process for producing full-color decals in glazes, Boldon purchased the necessary equipment and began exploring possibilities. “Our first idea,” he recalls, “was to use digital files in a panel system where you had a piece that was maybe 10 by 30 feet (3 × 9.1 m) and you divided it into whatever your style format was. We were printing multiple files, transferring them onto tiles, and then piecing them together in the installation process.”
Commissioned projects from the first phase of In Plain Sight Art’s collaborative work, such as What Was Once Imagined, a 40-foot (12.2-m) montage of images created for Catholic Charities of Minneapolis and St. Paul’s downtown St. Paul Homeless Shelter, were essentially murals on architectural tiles. “Instead of thinking about public art as a way to decorate a building or create an image that’s stuck on a wall,” Boldon says, “we were using architectural materials and a new technology to integrate with the architectural language.” In the second phase of the roughly 60 public projects completed by In Plain Sight Art to date, Boldon and Baur have increasingly exploited three-dimensionality. For example, the 2021 project From Idea to Practice, commissioned by the Louisiana Percent for Art program for the Engineering Sciences Building at Southeastern Louisiana University, combines a montage-decorated tile panel with relief elements of 3D-printed, glazed porcelain, kiln-formed glass, and stainless steel.
Back to the Roots
In 2022, tragedy struck Boldon and Baur, leading to a reassessment of life priorities and a move from urban Minneapolis to northwest Wisconsin. “The first thing I wanted to do was to just go back to my roots,” Boldon explains. “I remember very clearly as an undergraduate when I first got my twin lens reflex Mamiya camera. I just stopped drawing and painting. It wasn’t really a conscious choice. I just went toward photography. When they were able to put ceramic pigments through laser printers, my work became printmaking. I just re-evaluated all that and went back to my roots. I went out observationally, out into the landscape, and re-explored what it was like to not use a camera to capture things. For seven months, I just drew and painted. They weren’t very good pieces, but they were a way for me to reset the whole relationship with where I start creatively.”
Among the aspirations of Boldon’s new work was a more obtrusive three-dimensionality, pursued first in a series of non-ceramic wall pieces incorporating 3D-printed nylon cones, rings, cylinders, and parabolic forms held together in “thickets” of stainless-steel rods vaguely suggestive of open-weave fabrics. The three-dimensional maximalism of that series reflected a deliberate reversal of focus from the inner experience of rational reflection to an external, more immediately experiential relationship with the natural world. The next step was to translate the openness and translucence of the non-ceramic assemblages to the format of intimately scaled freestanding ceramic sculpture, an objective accomplished by employing clay in highly interpretive abstractions that referenced landscapes. “I’m not a plein-air painter trying to paint what I see,” Boldon says, “and it’s not about all the things that we know. I’ve been inspired by science my whole career. I could think of nothing more interesting than seeing a scientific image of a raindrop and then trying to print it in a glaze and put it on a tile. So, this was in many ways my reboot. To make this work was to say, I don’t care about science anymore. I just don’t care. All I really care about is whether this piece feels right. The only criterion was, does it feel like it’s a part of what’s out there?”
Holding Space
What’s out there is a dynamic nature: an unending cycle of ephemeralities, the wheel of life rotating above and in tandem with the continuous and universal entropy of matter and energy. To embrace that nature, as opposed to seeking control over it, required acceptance of change and loss as fundamental necessities. For Boldon, part of that acceptance involved adopting a more spontaneous, riskier approach to making which would open for him a new avenue to creativity after fifteen years of adhering to a routine of designing and pitching proposals before producing anything concrete. The new sculptures, in contrast, are drawn to the antithesis of concreteness. “They’re trying to hold space,” he explains, “and that’s really uncertain in a medium with all of the limitations of clay: gravity, structure, balance, and slumping in the kiln—all the problems you have with clay. It’s a fluid material throughout its entire process until, finally, you let go of it. I don’t want to lose any of that. I want it to feel like that’s still going on, still happening, even though the forms are physically static.”
That goal was conducive to an exploration of techniques less controllable than CAD/CAM production, opening for Boldon’s work a greater opportunity for the combination of serendipity and natural forces to influence outcomes. In works such as Dense Coupling, for example, the two pale blue ellipses forming an abstract sky above a convoluted field were poured from slip; likewise, the ox-blood circles set at right angles to one another. The rest of the forms, primarily porcelain hoops, were CAD/CAM generated, but they reflect a new conception of the 3D-printer as a “drawing tool” employed to add gesture to structure. “It was,” Boldon says, “like a printmaking transfer process: print a shape, a flat line drawing, onto a thin sheet of plastic; then flip it wet onto a slab and let it stiffen up. I had to get the timing right. I’d fire them, then go back and nest them into these volumes that I’d drawn, the printed and assembled things, then fuse them into place at cone 04 with a clear glaze. There was no map for how to make the assemblages. It was a discoverable process, just like being in the landscape. I took what I learned outside and just brought it into the studio.”
A Discovery Process
With a broad concept of drawing at their conceptual cores and a tendentious focus on three-dimensionality shaping their forms, the new sculptures offer the kinds of visual surprises inherent in what the abstract-expressionist David Smith called “drawings in space”—that is, such works as Boldon’s Perimeter Kinship are the contraries of gestalts. Far from being conceptually graspable from a single viewpoint, they are in effect composites of multiple compositions, each only accessible from a different angle. From one, Perimeter Kinship seems a zoomorphic abstraction: a fanciful linear evocation of a low-profile dinosaur or a duck-billed platypus. From another, representation gives way to pure non-objectivity in a spinning configuration of circles. From a third, a concentration of snarled lines teases at some cryptic content contained in illegible calligraphic messages. From a fourth, a surreal landscape positions a molten-disc sun, hollow at its core, beside a floating bubble in which a purple flower is inexplicably suspended. In the end, of course, the point is that the works cannot be adequately experienced without approaching them through the same experiential strategies as those demanded by the real world, by nature as a constantly changing complexity only imperfectly grasped not only in space, but also across time—the time it takes to move among and around things.
In this respect, Boldon’s new works are microcosms to be explored. “They’re self-sustaining,” he asserts. “In many ways, they’re their own private existence. What links them all together is the haptic approach to a discovery process; I didn’t labor over them. They just sprang from me fully formed. It was a very exciting experience.”
To learn more about Brian Boldon and his work, visit www.brianboldon.com or follow on Instagram @brianboldon8509.
the author Glen R. Brown is a professor of art history at Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kansas.
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