🎧 Brittany Mojo: Liminal States Susan McHenry

Appears in the September 2024 issue of Ceramics Monthly.

The audio file for this article was produced by the Ceramic Arts Network staff and not read by the author.

The notion that school could change a life wasn’t just a nice idea for Brittany Mojo: it proved to be true. Born and raised in northeast New Jersey to a large Italian-American family, Mojo knew early on that she wanted to have a career in the arts. She also knew that to forge her own path and discover who she was outside her family unit, she would need to make a big life change. So, when it was time to consider college, she only applied to schools in California. “I got lucky with California State University, Long Beach,” Mojo remarks, adding, “I couldn’t have landed in a better school.” She initially thought she might become a graphic designer, but once exposed to clay, everything changed, and she decided to major in ceramics. 

Under the tutelage of Kristen Morgin, whose unfired clay sculptures Mojo describes as “eye-opening,” she soon realized she could make anything from clay. “I felt a lot of freedom to explore the material.” In those days, undergraduate students had their own studio space and 24/7 access to the ceramics facilities. This structure instilled in Mojo what it means to have an art practice, “even if that means showing up for five minutes every day to push your work forward.” 

After her undergraduate studies, Mojo immediately knew she wanted to pursue her MFA and become a professor. At 22, she was one of the youngest students in the graduate art department at University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). Her studies there were interdisciplinary, encouraging her to work with materials other than clay and to emphasize the ideas behind her work. 

Grief and Outsideness 

In her book, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, political theorist Jane Bennett proposes that a “vital materiality” runs through the objects we encounter in our daily lives. Influenced by Bennett’s work, Mojo became intrigued by the influence of objects. As she was beginning to explore these ideas in her first year at UCLA, Mojo’s father died suddenly. This loss would have a profound impact on her life and her work throughout graduate school and beyond. 

Thinking back to her childhood after her grandfather’s death, Mojo recalled how her grandmother couldn’t sit down. “She needed to keep moving, to stay busy. It was as though she was saying, ‘If I sit down, I’m not going to stand up again.’” Mojo’s mother had remarked that her grandmother needed to “keep her hands busy.” That expression made an impression upon young Mojo, one that came back to her after her own father’s death. She remembers thinking, “If I don’t go to the studio, I’m going to sit home and wallow.” Unsure of what to make, she just started squeezing clay in her hands. Each piece of clay became a mold of the grip of her hand. “It was almost like a performance for myself,” she reflects. She used a knitting needle to hollow out the forms, which became beads. When the porcelain pieces came out of the kiln, Mojo observed their bone-like nature. It was at this time that she stopped using color, limiting the work to the clay’s natural color. During grief, the world can feel devoid of color, and Mojo was “interested in the absence of color as a way of making sense of the world at that time.” 

Mojo describes her relationship with her father as complicated. “He was pretty patriarchal,” she notes. “Our relationship was strained after I moved to California.” After her father’s death, Mojo says she felt on the outside looking in. “I wasn’t there when he died, while everyone else was.” Through reflection and writing, and later through her thesis research, Mojo explored the concept of outsideness, studying the concept of otherness from the readings of psychoanalysts Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. 

Mojo felt compelled to make work that reflected “the liminal space between here and there” that grief had opened. Around this time, she was also struggling with imposter syndrome, feeling insecure about being so young in the older, intellectualized space of UCLA. She became inspired by the wrought-iron fences on Hollywood estates, whose grandiosity stood in stark contrast to her life in a self-described run-down apartment, spending hours commuting to Los Angeles. “There is a clear distinction to be made between being on the outside looking in, or the inside looking out. Those experiences feel very different. I wanted to physically make that barrier.” Mojo conceived her curtain installation as a way to coalesce the beads that were “born of grief.” The installation forces bodies through and around objects, negotiating the boundaries between inside and outside. Strung together and hung from ceiling to floor, the beads create a curtain that viewers can see through and walk around. The ceramic pieces sway and chime as viewers pass by or brush up against them. 

Vessels as Containment 

Part of Mojo’s 2016 thesis show includes a ware cart displaying vessels made from clay, paper, and plaster. She employed a diaristic approach—making a bottle a day—after her father’s death. Daily objects that can be of use took on an unexpected level of importance. When her father died, she yearned to be around his things—his clothing, the wooden spoon he used to cook. “His physicality was no longer there. The magic of him was gone. Those items were his, imbued with his physicality.” 

As she was considering the relationship between interior and exterior, between here and there, the vessel as a form of containment was calling to her. “There was a paring down, a stripping away of things,” she reflects, “My world was being reshaped.” Mojo considered her body as being infused with the experience of her father’s death. Her hands were the conduit for her ideas, her thoughts. The vessels, constructed slowly, one coil at a time, became containers for her grief. Mojo notes that her vessels are not intended to be functional. She doesn’t use glazes and the work is not watertight. Rather, she thinks of them as symbols representing the ideas of pots. Mojo constructs her vessels with a stoneware paper clay, which, by its nature, accommodates her commuter lifestyle (Mojo and her husband, sculptor Chris Miller, split their time between Long Beach and Los Osos). “If I’m in LA for five days, I can come back to the studio in Los Osos and add another coil to an already bone-dry pot. It takes the pressure off.” The paper clay’s inherent strength also allows her to safely transport her thin pieces back and forth between home and work. 

Reconceiving Women’s Work 

The concept of labor and women’s work, what Mojo refers to as “works of the hand,” or “lap work,” also factors prominently in her portfolio. She has reflected on the notion of women themselves as vessels, as carriers, as those who hold. Though she grew up surrounded by women in her family, Mojo recalls that the men took up a lot of space. She became more aware of this once she left home. It wasn’t just the physical labor of her female relatives that she took note of, but the emotional labor—the caring for, the giving of attention to. What women give is often gentle and quiet in comparison to men, Mojo observes, and is often overlooked or taken for granted. “Women’s labor is ignored, often not compensated, and not valued, yet we all rely on it. It’s foundational.” In her ceramic work, the repetitive quality of coil building and revealing evidence of the hand—what Mojo refers to as “a record of time spent”—were once deliberate decisions. Now, they are second nature, though they still recall the defining influences of women’s work. 

A Return to Color and Embracing Play 

While in Barcelona, Spain, last summer, through a house swap, Mojo became inspired by the pattern, color, and tile that surrounded her. “It was a feast for the eyes!” she remarks. Upon returning home, she visited a dear friend in hospice who, just days before his death, urged her to move beyond the black-and-white work she had been making since the pandemic. She has wholeheartedly embraced this advice in preparation for solo shows in 2025 at the Craig Krull Gallery in Santa Monica, and the Carolyn Campagna Kleefeld Contemporary Art Museum at California State University, Long Beach, California, where she completed her undergraduate studies. Her overall concept for the show relates to recess, as in physical play. 

This recent return to color has been liberating for Mojo, who says that her guiding principle is to choose “bad colors,”—ones that don’t typically “go together.” Currently, she’s researching traditional crafts that employ pattern—such as quilts, tile work, mosaic, and textiles. Use of the grid as a recurring design element first appeared in Mojo’s work during her undergraduate days. She describes this time as being “the height of my joy in making.” Whether a ladder, a wall hanging made of toothpicks, or a painted surface in an installation, the grid has always been an organizing principle in her work. And it’s showing up again through pattern in this recent series. Mojo dislikes the term “decoration,” when it comes to her surfaces, preferring to use “surface” as a verb instead. The checker pattern she’s currently surfacing comes from a desire to make the vessels look as though they have a taut cloth around them. 

Mojo’s recent work utilizes various colored clays. To make the colors, she mixes stain or underglaze into white clay. She then cuts the colored clay into uneven ¾-inch (1.9-cm) tiles that are appliquéd to an existing vessel. Throughout this labor-intensive process, she’s striving for the quality of a beginner’s hand, “as though a child might have made it.” Choosing not to measure the ratio of stain or underglaze to clay, she never mixes the colors the same way twice. Instead, she’s inviting a spirit of play into the process. Mojo utilizes a mid-range porcelain slip to attach the tiles to the form. The slip fluxes in the kiln, fusing the tiles in place. Of the work, gallerist Craig Krull describes it as having a “haphazard geometry, more fluid, like a rippling flag.” 

The Value of Writing and Community 

Even if it’s a simple word association, Mojo makes time to write every day. Writing about the work enables her to edit or eliminate certain pieces. Mojo has always been interested in words, noting that art is its own language. She loves to read and write, emphasizing, “It’s as important as eating.” She considers herself lucky to have that relationship with words and doesn’t believe her ceramic work would be where it is today without writing about it. She typically writes at the end of the day while still in her studio. She asks herself what she’s seeing in the work before her. “I might know things are connected, but until I see it on paper, it’s hard to know if I’m going in the right direction.” 

Now that she’s a full-time professor of art at Cuesta College in San Luis Obispo, California, Mojo sees how teaching has become tangential to her studio practice, noting, “What happens in the classroom relates to what’s happening in my studio.” She has exhibited widely across the US and internationally, including Germany, Austria, and Italy. Mojo emphasizes how community has been crucial to her success in the contemporary art world. She has had the rare opportunity to build her own ceramics program and emphasizes that luck and privilege have factored prominently in where she is today. “It can be easy to think all you have to do is work hard,” she says, “but the experiences you have go a long way.” 

To learn more about Brittany Mojo, visit brittanymojo.com or follow on Instagram @brittanymojo. 

the author Susan McHenry, is a studio potter, writer, and educator based in Kalamazoo, Michigan. She has an MFA in writing and literature from Bennington College. To learn more, visit susanmchenryceramics.com or follow on Instagram @susanmchenryceramics.