The audio file for this article was produced by the Ceramic Arts Network staff and not read by the author.
Chris Gustin recently mounted “Wild Things,” his first solo show at the Lucy Lacoste Gallery in Concord, Massachusetts, and their long-anticipated collaboration was well worth the wait. In this body of new stoneware sculpture, the maturity of his craft deepens into a remarkable synthesis of earthly and spiritual concerns. Those familiar with Gustin’s career will recognize his formal vocabulary and aesthetic preoccupations in this latest collection of large-scale ceramic vessels, many of them fired in his famous anagama in South Dartmouth, Massachusetts. But, this was not a retrospective celebration of Gustin’s technical mastery and signature style. Entering the gallery, one felt again the excitement of finding fresh expressions of the inherent wildness of clay in the kiln, transformed into works of disarming poise.
Material and Form: Clay, Body, Gravity
A crux of the show is the push/pull between the immaterial and the material. That perennial tension is signaled in the titles of the three series shown here: Spirit, Cloud, and Sprite. Across them all, organic abstraction is given free rein, with colors and shapes at times reminiscent of Ken Price’s late work. In some of the smaller pieces, bulbous knobs spill out this way and that like a clutch of fish eggs or a bushel of gourds. One particularly affecting Sprite (#2513), the largest of the series, sports a proboscis-like appendage near its top that instantly grants it an unmistakable personality. In the Cloud Series, a more elegant presence emerges from the pile up of rounded forms: the gorgeous anagama-fired #2302 is part thunderhead, part mountain, compact and monumental at the same time. Its ash drips softly, pulling the ascending thrust of the composition back down to earth, like rain or a waterfall seen from a distance.
And yet the center of gravity and the impetus toward levity in this exhibit is decidedly located in the corporeal. The larger pieces, improvised though they may be, convey a fundamental assurance in their construction of a human-like vertical form, whether slouched or proudly upright. The massing of each closed-form sculpture ensures that its incidental details, however prominent, orbit a commanding core. Bulk and volume resolve into equilibrium, and irrational curves and hollows read as a function of unlabored balance. The eye senses the artist’s mastery in how weight is distributed, how volume breathes, and how centered, self-supporting strength emerges from within.
As an ensemble, these curvaceous vessels stood, rested, or squatted in the gallery on rectilinear platforms and pedestals that permitted our movement around and through these sculptural families. At a glance, the room was full of distinct figures, embodiments of process and intention, that are related by birth and reunited for this unrepeatable moment in the space we have entered. Clustered figures in the round catch light from all sides; illuminated recesses and reflective surfaces encourage upward and downward scanning. Shadows cast by the work on the floor and walls suggested a congregation of living beings. Even the sidewalk traffic outside the gallery enlivened the room, as pedestrians’ rhythms were mirrored in the sculptures’ subtle implied movement. In Spirit Series #2505, the bulging horizontal midsection, gorgeously accentuated by streaks from the kiln firing that descend to the pseudopods that support the piece, suggests a confident stride into our shared space.
Carnal Encounters
As individuals, the vessels recapitulate the core relation of clay and body as one medium of physicality in the world. While their names may place them in a lineage that seeks a higher plane of existence, their forms are forthrightly voluptuous, corpulent even. This is not mortal clay covered in the ash of decay, but life-affirming earth transmuted into enduring presence, akin to the carved “Venus” figurines of Paleolithic Eurasia. We detect the persistence of the ancient goddess archetype even without literal figuration, while the forms’ playful refusal of hierarchy desacralizes the objects and our experience with them.
These “spirits” assert themselves variously with humor, gentle provocation, and unabashed sensuality. The allusions to body parts are profuse: rounded contours and pendulous distensions are layered in ways that insist on our reading them as metaphorical torsos, bellies, buttocks, breasts, shoulders, knees, scrotums, and backs, often brought together in one ambiguous or non-binary figure. When we realize what is missing from these bodies—limbs, digits, tails, necks, ears, faces—we can better understand where Gustin is concentrating the energy of this work. Volume is enclosed within shapes that are always “on their way to becoming,” gravid with possibility or pregnancy. The forms emanate, rather than reach out. And at the same time, they unflinchingly offer us their invitation to be touched—perhaps transgressive in an art gallery context but irresistible nonetheless. We feel welcomed to participate, with eye or hand, in their gentle eroticism of self-generating growth. As we settle into the encounter, the exposed curves and bulges embody a kind of life force instead of merely describing anatomy.
We can compare Gustin’s closed forms with the totemic constructions of Jun Kaneko or Toshiko Takaezu to note how his dynamic contours—less cylindrical or globular, more knobby and irregular—navigate a dialog between singularity and plurality. In the exhibit’s strongest pieces, the forms seem to hold several sculptural possibilities at once. Gustin’s artist statement explains his aspiration toward multiplicity: “I hope to evoke numerous memories, recollections that have the potential to change from moment to moment, provoking connections that go past the intellectual to the innate.” One of the triumphs of the show, Spirit Series #2314, standing at 55 ft. (16.7 m) tall, was described by a gallery visitor as “a group hug.” Experienced head-on or in the round, this broad-shouldered work, tapering slightly to its undulating base, has an impressive muscular outline that connotes concentrated power alive with potential. The gorgeous modulation of color from gray bronze around its top to copper green below imbues the piece with a heroic stature, as if it had been pulled from an ancient shipwreck in the Aegean Sea.
Gustin deftly manages balance and posture in what we presume are emergent rather than carefully planned forms. Radial symmetry is approximate, never mechanical. The vessels’ surfaces refuse any hard angle; even their bases are curved and never fully flush with the surfaces underneath them. The upright pieces typically rest on three or four “feet” that come across more like touch points than structural necessity, and convey variations of standing or sitting postures, suggesting a sentient stance. The implication of inherent energy is further enhanced by the contrapposto effects in several works, such as Spirit Series #2504.
Associations and Transformations
The color palette is harmonious within a narrow tonal range: taupe, yellow, tan, blue-green, deep orange, stone-gray, cloud-gray. Some hues are so subtle they barely register as color. These are not painterly chromatic works. The lighter pieces benefit from connotations of polished agate or sandstone. The darker pieces acquire in prominent areas the look of patinated bronze, with echoes of Henry Moore and Rodin. Ash glazing traces seams and contours through channels that mark gravity’s pull. Some pieces suggest an emergence from immersion, a process nearly completed, while in others the glaze behavior creates warm, skin-like textures. Geologic parallels, as is common for this kind of wood-fired work, help expand the field of associations: lava flow, eroded stone, mineral veins, cave accretions, and soil runoff. As changing daylight in the gallery transformed the works’ color, sheen, and shadow, we could appreciate the interplay of elemental process and organic life as a temporal continuum extending from the kiln onward into whatever homes these works may find.
It was also a treat to revisit Gustin’s functional ware in the context of this exhibition. On view were a dozen cups, for tea or whiskey or sake as you wish, that bring the artist’s formal vocabulary to a more intimate scale. A detail of form helped draw out the conversation of this familiar line of work with the much larger closed vessels nearby: the concave dimples and indented waists of the clay cups accommodate our fingers while at the same time pooling or redirecting various glaze effects in dramatic ways. Meanwhile, the convexities of the sculptures invite a broader caress of the palm and distribute colors and textures more expansively over the surface areas.
The show’s title notwithstanding, there is nothing monstrous in these works. Instead, Gustin revels in the wildness of clay as a form of generosity: the willingness of matter to swell, settle, and become. These vessels ask nothing more—and nothing less—than that we meet them with the same attention he has given them. It is in that shared encounter, somewhere between body and spirit, that their quiet power resides.
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The audio file for this article was produced by the Ceramic Arts Network staff and not read by the author.
Chris Gustin recently mounted “Wild Things,” his first solo show at the Lucy Lacoste Gallery in Concord, Massachusetts, and their long-anticipated collaboration was well worth the wait. In this body of new stoneware sculpture, the maturity of his craft deepens into a remarkable synthesis of earthly and spiritual concerns. Those familiar with Gustin’s career will recognize his formal vocabulary and aesthetic preoccupations in this latest collection of large-scale ceramic vessels, many of them fired in his famous anagama in South Dartmouth, Massachusetts. But, this was not a retrospective celebration of Gustin’s technical mastery and signature style. Entering the gallery, one felt again the excitement of finding fresh expressions of the inherent wildness of clay in the kiln, transformed into works of disarming poise.
Material and Form: Clay, Body, Gravity
A crux of the show is the push/pull between the immaterial and the material. That perennial tension is signaled in the titles of the three series shown here: Spirit, Cloud, and Sprite. Across them all, organic abstraction is given free rein, with colors and shapes at times reminiscent of Ken Price’s late work. In some of the smaller pieces, bulbous knobs spill out this way and that like a clutch of fish eggs or a bushel of gourds. One particularly affecting Sprite (#2513), the largest of the series, sports a proboscis-like appendage near its top that instantly grants it an unmistakable personality. In the Cloud Series, a more elegant presence emerges from the pile up of rounded forms: the gorgeous anagama-fired #2302 is part thunderhead, part mountain, compact and monumental at the same time. Its ash drips softly, pulling the ascending thrust of the composition back down to earth, like rain or a waterfall seen from a distance.
And yet the center of gravity and the impetus toward levity in this exhibit is decidedly located in the corporeal. The larger pieces, improvised though they may be, convey a fundamental assurance in their construction of a human-like vertical form, whether slouched or proudly upright. The massing of each closed-form sculpture ensures that its incidental details, however prominent, orbit a commanding core. Bulk and volume resolve into equilibrium, and irrational curves and hollows read as a function of unlabored balance. The eye senses the artist’s mastery in how weight is distributed, how volume breathes, and how centered, self-supporting strength emerges from within.
As an ensemble, these curvaceous vessels stood, rested, or squatted in the gallery on rectilinear platforms and pedestals that permitted our movement around and through these sculptural families. At a glance, the room was full of distinct figures, embodiments of process and intention, that are related by birth and reunited for this unrepeatable moment in the space we have entered. Clustered figures in the round catch light from all sides; illuminated recesses and reflective surfaces encourage upward and downward scanning. Shadows cast by the work on the floor and walls suggested a congregation of living beings. Even the sidewalk traffic outside the gallery enlivened the room, as pedestrians’ rhythms were mirrored in the sculptures’ subtle implied movement. In Spirit Series #2505, the bulging horizontal midsection, gorgeously accentuated by streaks from the kiln firing that descend to the pseudopods that support the piece, suggests a confident stride into our shared space.
Carnal Encounters
As individuals, the vessels recapitulate the core relation of clay and body as one medium of physicality in the world. While their names may place them in a lineage that seeks a higher plane of existence, their forms are forthrightly voluptuous, corpulent even. This is not mortal clay covered in the ash of decay, but life-affirming earth transmuted into enduring presence, akin to the carved “Venus” figurines of Paleolithic Eurasia. We detect the persistence of the ancient goddess archetype even without literal figuration, while the forms’ playful refusal of hierarchy desacralizes the objects and our experience with them.
These “spirits” assert themselves variously with humor, gentle provocation, and unabashed sensuality. The allusions to body parts are profuse: rounded contours and pendulous distensions are layered in ways that insist on our reading them as metaphorical torsos, bellies, buttocks, breasts, shoulders, knees, scrotums, and backs, often brought together in one ambiguous or non-binary figure. When we realize what is missing from these bodies—limbs, digits, tails, necks, ears, faces—we can better understand where Gustin is concentrating the energy of this work. Volume is enclosed within shapes that are always “on their way to becoming,” gravid with possibility or pregnancy. The forms emanate, rather than reach out. And at the same time, they unflinchingly offer us their invitation to be touched—perhaps transgressive in an art gallery context but irresistible nonetheless. We feel welcomed to participate, with eye or hand, in their gentle eroticism of self-generating growth. As we settle into the encounter, the exposed curves and bulges embody a kind of life force instead of merely describing anatomy.
We can compare Gustin’s closed forms with the totemic constructions of Jun Kaneko or Toshiko Takaezu to note how his dynamic contours—less cylindrical or globular, more knobby and irregular—navigate a dialog between singularity and plurality. In the exhibit’s strongest pieces, the forms seem to hold several sculptural possibilities at once. Gustin’s artist statement explains his aspiration toward multiplicity: “I hope to evoke numerous memories, recollections that have the potential to change from moment to moment, provoking connections that go past the intellectual to the innate.” One of the triumphs of the show, Spirit Series #2314, standing at 55 ft. (16.7 m) tall, was described by a gallery visitor as “a group hug.” Experienced head-on or in the round, this broad-shouldered work, tapering slightly to its undulating base, has an impressive muscular outline that connotes concentrated power alive with potential. The gorgeous modulation of color from gray bronze around its top to copper green below imbues the piece with a heroic stature, as if it had been pulled from an ancient shipwreck in the Aegean Sea.
Gustin deftly manages balance and posture in what we presume are emergent rather than carefully planned forms. Radial symmetry is approximate, never mechanical. The vessels’ surfaces refuse any hard angle; even their bases are curved and never fully flush with the surfaces underneath them. The upright pieces typically rest on three or four “feet” that come across more like touch points than structural necessity, and convey variations of standing or sitting postures, suggesting a sentient stance. The implication of inherent energy is further enhanced by the contrapposto effects in several works, such as Spirit Series #2504.
Associations and Transformations
The color palette is harmonious within a narrow tonal range: taupe, yellow, tan, blue-green, deep orange, stone-gray, cloud-gray. Some hues are so subtle they barely register as color. These are not painterly chromatic works. The lighter pieces benefit from connotations of polished agate or sandstone. The darker pieces acquire in prominent areas the look of patinated bronze, with echoes of Henry Moore and Rodin. Ash glazing traces seams and contours through channels that mark gravity’s pull. Some pieces suggest an emergence from immersion, a process nearly completed, while in others the glaze behavior creates warm, skin-like textures. Geologic parallels, as is common for this kind of wood-fired work, help expand the field of associations: lava flow, eroded stone, mineral veins, cave accretions, and soil runoff. As changing daylight in the gallery transformed the works’ color, sheen, and shadow, we could appreciate the interplay of elemental process and organic life as a temporal continuum extending from the kiln onward into whatever homes these works may find.
It was also a treat to revisit Gustin’s functional ware in the context of this exhibition. On view were a dozen cups, for tea or whiskey or sake as you wish, that bring the artist’s formal vocabulary to a more intimate scale. A detail of form helped draw out the conversation of this familiar line of work with the much larger closed vessels nearby: the concave dimples and indented waists of the clay cups accommodate our fingers while at the same time pooling or redirecting various glaze effects in dramatic ways. Meanwhile, the convexities of the sculptures invite a broader caress of the palm and distribute colors and textures more expansively over the surface areas.
The show’s title notwithstanding, there is nothing monstrous in these works. Instead, Gustin revels in the wildness of clay as a form of generosity: the willingness of matter to swell, settle, and become. These vessels ask nothing more—and nothing less—than that we meet them with the same attention he has given them. It is in that shared encounter, somewhere between body and spirit, that their quiet power resides.
To learn more about Chris Gustin and his work, visit gustinceramics.com or follow on Instagram @gustinceramics.
the author Gary Roberts is a ceramics collector and past president of the Society of Arts and Crafts in Boston, Massachusetts.
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