🎧 Corwyn Lund: Entrée to Chance Glen R. Brown

Appears in the April 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.

Light, heat, and shadow. Photography, ceramics, and architecture. This duo of triads orients the eye and mind through the work of artist Corwyn Lund in ways sometimes overt and sometimes esoteric. Often, the journey is intuitive, a matter of advancing tentatively through association. Variations in radiant energy, or light, produce effects of imagery in photography. Heat, a consequence of light’s conversion to kinetic energy, transforms raw clay into ceramic. Shadows are cast when walls absorb the visible spectrum of light, and the combination of walls, floor, and roof conjures architectural interiors, firing chambers of kilns, and darkrooms where analog photography is still processed into relative permanence as records of light and shadow. 

A Sense of Wonder and Serendipity 

Lund is led to such associations partly by an interest in the kind of chance collaboration with materials and processes that ceramic artists know and respect: a practice of ceding some degree of opportunity for creativity to the caprices of clay, glaze, gravity, and heat. Photographers have known a similar collaboration with light and chemicals. “In the early days,” Lund asserts, “photography was not entirely under control. Light entered the dark interior of a camera and came out affixed as an image, provoking a sense of wonder at the process. Similarly, ceramic goes into a kiln where it’s bathed in heat. The result may be good or it may be bad, but the sense of wonder at the transformation never fades because you never know exactly how things will go.” 

An artist who values serendipity is generally expected to encourage it through methods of working that offer deliberate entrée to chance. In Lund’s work, that has often involved preparing industrially produced porcelain panels to influence the movement of glaze. He has, for example, frequently employed a contractor’s tile-saw to “incise” lines that act sometimes as barriers to and sometimes as channels for the migration of glaze. Chance is also encouraged on a conceptual level, where linear thought is interrupted and informed by unexpected outcomes. “Making is a dialog between process and thinking,” Lund explains. “When something doesn’t do what I wanted but is actually more interesting than what I had in mind, I discover new directions for further exploration.” 

Organic, Yet Intuitive 

Beneath the spontaneity of that dialog, Lund’s intuition returns repeatedly to light, heat, and shadow. In this regard, a pair of porcelain panels titled Quilted/Blistered is illuminating. Each was sprayed with an “absurdly thick” application of glaze to achieve a color gradient approximating the visible spectrum of light. After firing the panels horizontally and then sawing grids through the glaze and into the ceramic substrate, Lund refired them at an angle to encourage the molten glaze to flow toward the incisions but halt just short of spilling into them. In each diamond-shaped quadrangle of the grid, the glaze is concentrated unevenly. The gradation of hues, specular highlights, and shadows enhance the impression of three-dimensionality: the quilted effect that gives the first panel its name. The title of the second derives from associations more organic. 

“It looked like sun-blistered skin,” he recalls. “Faintly colored orange, tinged almost greenish and yellowish, its surface taut from swelling: I couldn’t help but think of the panel as blistered. In the lower left-hand corner, there’s a flaw, so to speak, where one of the ‘blisters’ has ruptured, going beyond what I’d hoped for. I can live with that because it’s indicative of the tension and risk in the making process. I think about tiles as the skin of architecture: a membrane between the guts of buildings and our bodies. After the back and forth between making and thinking comes the naming process: when the thing is finished and I ask myself, ‘What is this thing actually saying to me, filtered through my biases and interests?’” 

An Apprehension of an Apocalypse 

Blistered, as a bias of interests, is grounded in the physics of non-visible light and heat. Blisters can be a consequence of damage to cells from high-frequency light waves (ultraviolet radiation). The heat of sunlight on skin arises from positive acceleration of molecules when radiant energy, particularly low-frequency infrared radiation, is absorbed. However, the sinister aspect of naming an elegant artwork Blistered derives from the slipping of physics into psychology. For Lund, reflection on the nature of light as energy and heat as its alter ego has long held the capacity to tap into an apprehension of apocalypse. Among all the ceramic objects that he has encountered, the one most impactful has been a small sometsuke bowl encrusted on its exterior with a fused bricolage of debris: a vessel in the collection of the Science Museum, London, UK, that he describes as “para-photographic” due to its refiring by the intense light and subsequent heat of the Hiroshima nuclear blast. If there is a perverse sabi in that poignant relic, its pathos lies in the human inclination to ride the death drive to the point of extinction. “Growing up during the 1980s Cold War, I felt certain there was going to be a nuclear conflict,” Lund remembers, “I was very young and feeding myself on a steady diet of punk rock with its highly politicized lyrics and angst-ridden delivery. In the last few years, with the consciousness developing around the devastating effects of climate change, I realized that the same existential concern for the fate of the earth and humanity that I felt in the 1980s has returned.” 

In terms of the para-photographic aspects of the Hiroshima bowl, the closest parallels in Lund’s work may be the Rothko-like diffusive forms in the cobalt glaze of Kiln Heat Blueprints, a polyptych in which each panel—fired against the floor or sides of the kiln as a kind of camera or darkroom but in a process analogous to making a photogram—bears memories of the heating elements. These memories are ghostly indices that, to a receptive mind, might conjure the incinerated Hiroshima dead whose shadows were negatively etched into steps and sidewalks by the split-second radiant energy of the nuclear blast. 

The aftermath of nuclear catastrophe is more overtly implied in the pairing Hot Flash/Cold Ash, two porcelain panels—one with maroon glaze and the other with maroon glaze over a turquoise glaze—both cut with perspectival drawings suggesting a tiled wall meeting a tiled floor. Positioning the panels at an angle during glaze application and firing produced both literal and imagistic effects of gravity. In Hot Flash, the floor appears to melt and reveal hollow chambers into which a blood-like residue viscously drips. In Cold Ash, the thickened and speckled combination of maroon and turquoise glaze pictorially invokes heaps of cinders or rows of anonymous graves under freshly mounded earth. “When the war in Ukraine escalated in 2022,” Lund says, “the threats to nuclear reactors and talk about tactical nuclear weapons left me thinking about dark things, which entered my work. In pairing Hot Flash and Cold Ash, I saw one panel as an urban space at the moment of a nuclear detonation, while the other depicts the fallout when the sun is blotted out and the ash of all that has burned settles to the ground.” 

Trouble in Paradise 

These thoughts are grim but perfectly understandable given the proliferation of existential threats to life on earth. Among the pins in our contemporary polycrisis, climate change, like the prospect of a nuclear holocaust, is both anthropogenic in origin and physically a matter of radiant energy converting to heat. There is trouble in paradise, even in the turquoise waters of a partly serendipitous “glaze picture” that Lund named (The Ecology) in reference to the subtitle of the 1971 Marvin Gaye song “Mercy, Mercy Me.” “It’s surprisingly prophetic in its lyrics,” Lund comments, reflecting on the allusions to environmental threats that a half-century later have become even more dire. In (The Ecology), the climatic sword of Damocles hanging over the heads of the ostensible masters of the earth is implied by a lengthy firing crack that splits the panel in two, cutting through what could easily be construed as a glaze-relief image of a coral reef that has not yet succumbed fatally to heat stress. In such a context, Lund’s repair of the crack with a streak of gold simulated in epoxy and brass powder offers a sliver of hope that humanity might still avoid crossing the 1.5°C (2.7 °F) climate threshold beyond which most of the world’s coral reefs are estimated to bleach into oblivion by 2050. 

The gold is also, of course, an endorsement of chance and a “nod to the kintsugi tradition of repairing things,” Lund says. “I think it adds a lot. It took a while for me to come to terms with the crack, to give over what I was trying to achieve to what actually happened. There’s a strong push and pull between what an artist wants to happen with ceramics and what ceramics wants to happen. It puts you in your place, robs you of your anthropocentric viewpoint. It’s really humbling.” 

the author Glen R. Brown is a professor of art history at Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kansas.