It’s interesting how often, within our field, we discuss formal decisions in binaries—functional or sculptural, interior or exterior, form or surface. These couplings provide a useful shorthand to describe and delineate choices about function, space, volume, and ornamentation. And yet clay, in its ability to become whatever the maker determines, resists this tidy categorization.
This month’s focus on figurative and narrative clay invites us to step beyond those familiar pairings. The figure complicates the functional and sculptural divide; it may inhabit a vessel, be scrawled around its wall, or occupy space in its presence or absence. Narrative upsets the separation between form and surface, asking imagery, texture, and gesture to carry the story as much as silhouette and mass do. In the works on the pages that follow, surface is not just ornamentation, and form is not just structure. They are collaborators in meaning.
What I find particularly compelling about the artists in this issue is how they have embedded their stories into their work.
As editors of Ceramics Monthly, we reserve placement on the cover of each month’s issue for work within the magazine, sans maker; however, on this rare occasion, we have selected Shae Bishop’s Rhinestone Rattlesnakeboy Suit, worn by Bishop himself. His meticulously stitched works are activated through use; when worn, these tile garments show his mastery of construction and conceptual execution. The work itself is not complete without the figure to inhabit and use its skin. D Wood discusses how his work challenges ideas of masculinity in the American West and South, providing protection from elements, creatures, and societal expectations.
Misty Gamble’s mastery of capturing tension in posture, effectively communicating the weight of beauty, consumption, and ecofeminism, is explored in this month’s Artist’s Voice feature. She shares how early exposure to the world of puppetry and theater built an understanding of the power of silent gesture.
Katy Stubbs’ narrative vessels are adorned with illustrations and sculptural appendages that highlight what she finds compelling, funny, and challenging, in small, curated collections like the corkboard on your studio wall. Curating and cementing them together at an intimate scale, she assembles portraits of popular culture, the contradictions of our present moment, and bits of herself—frozen through fire.
Maybe these traditional binaries—functional and sculptural, form and surface—aren’t opposites as much as points on a spectrum. Figurative and narrative clay asks us to consider another coupling: object and subject, and how these two push and pull us into a greater understanding of how something can embody both. As you move through this issue, I invite you to look for moments where categories dissolve—where a pot becomes a stage, where waste becomes functional, where architecture becomes vessel, and where clay does what it has always done well: hold the weight of our stories.
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It’s interesting how often, within our field, we discuss formal decisions in binaries—functional or sculptural, interior or exterior, form or surface. These couplings provide a useful shorthand to describe and delineate choices about function, space, volume, and ornamentation. And yet clay, in its ability to become whatever the maker determines, resists this tidy categorization.
This month’s focus on figurative and narrative clay invites us to step beyond those familiar pairings. The figure complicates the functional and sculptural divide; it may inhabit a vessel, be scrawled around its wall, or occupy space in its presence or absence. Narrative upsets the separation between form and surface, asking imagery, texture, and gesture to carry the story as much as silhouette and mass do. In the works on the pages that follow, surface is not just ornamentation, and form is not just structure. They are collaborators in meaning.
What I find particularly compelling about the artists in this issue is how they have embedded their stories into their work.
As editors of Ceramics Monthly, we reserve placement on the cover of each month’s issue for work within the magazine, sans maker; however, on this rare occasion, we have selected Shae Bishop’s Rhinestone Rattlesnakeboy Suit, worn by Bishop himself. His meticulously stitched works are activated through use; when worn, these tile garments show his mastery of construction and conceptual execution. The work itself is not complete without the figure to inhabit and use its skin. D Wood discusses how his work challenges ideas of masculinity in the American West and South, providing protection from elements, creatures, and societal expectations.
Misty Gamble’s mastery of capturing tension in posture, effectively communicating the weight of beauty, consumption, and ecofeminism, is explored in this month’s Artist’s Voice feature. She shares how early exposure to the world of puppetry and theater built an understanding of the power of silent gesture.
Katy Stubbs’ narrative vessels are adorned with illustrations and sculptural appendages that highlight what she finds compelling, funny, and challenging, in small, curated collections like the corkboard on your studio wall. Curating and cementing them together at an intimate scale, she assembles portraits of popular culture, the contradictions of our present moment, and bits of herself—frozen through fire.
Maybe these traditional binaries—functional and sculptural, form and surface—aren’t opposites as much as points on a spectrum. Figurative and narrative clay asks us to consider another coupling: object and subject, and how these two push and pull us into a greater understanding of how something can embody both. As you move through this issue, I invite you to look for moments where categories dissolve—where a pot becomes a stage, where waste becomes functional, where architecture becomes vessel, and where clay does what it has always done well: hold the weight of our stories.
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