🎧 Maura Wright: Creating What She Wants Brandon Reintjes

Appears in the October 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.

Necessity used to be the mother of invention, but then we ran out of things that were necessary. The postmodern mother of invention is desire; we don’t really “need” anything new, so we only create what we want. –Chuck Klosterman

Maura Wright is finishing up a long-term residency at the Archie Bray Foundation for Ceramic Arts in Helena, Montana. During her two-year residency, Wright has been producing at a dizzying rate, maximizing the opportunities the Bray affords with a series of high-profile exhibitions at Design Miami with AGO projects; Tinworks Art in Bozeman, Montana; a solo exhibition at the Jane Hartsook Gallery at NYC’s Greenwich House Pottery; a profile in Architectural Digest ; and mentions in both Vogue Mexico and Dwell magazines.

Wright is a ceramic artist whose vases, tureens, and basket forms are obsessively embellished with drippy glazes, embedded mosaics, simple pinched florals, and arcing, looping handles, and fins. She creates forms that are deep and generous—rotund, swooping, or squat—glazed with bold geometries, pale pinks, or luster-esque mirror finishes that darkly reflect viewers.

A Range of Styles and Influences

Primarily working in earthenware, Wright’s largely coil-built vessels incorporate a wide range of visual styles and influences—French porcelain from the Rococo, Greek kraters, Italian frescos, Mid-Century Modernism, and American folk art. In her artist statement from Red Lodge Clay Center, where she was a short-term resident in 2019, she says, “I fell in love with vessels through my introduction to the histories of ceramics in architecture and utility. I view the vessel less as an object and more as a subject; a vehicle to expressively decorate, to meditatively and gesturally ornament.”

The most satisfying aspect of Wright’s work is when it is in abundance and the viewer’s eye jumps between the visual continuity and discordance of various forms and contrasting glazes. The delight is in noticing that Wright’s works—with bold, contrasting patterns, a variety of big showy handles, ostentatious wings, sinuous ribbons, and vivacious curves—are the result of not three, but a single artist. Wright further confounds the viewer by pairing vessels with other assorted ceramic objects—larger-than-life charm bracelets and nail clippers, cellophane-wrapped hard candy, a length of braided hair, the errant hand or foot. In turn, ceramic objects are routinely positioned in contrast with paintings done on paper or painted directly on the wall. She revels in the unexpected.

As a maker, Wright is difficult to pigeonhole. Rather than being beholden to a gallery, audience, or even a particular medium, she makes work to satisfy her own creative instinct and intellect. She adheres to a “no rules” maxim—anything is possible. Though she’s a dedicated ceramic artist, she thinks in terms of installations or, as she calls them, environments. She builds each of her ceramic forms with future environments in mind, pairing pieces according to theme or sometimes according to what will generate the most dissonance.

Enhancing the Surface

Wright is not really interested in function or functional ware, except in how objects function in the world or perhaps as aesthetic objects. She is, however, interested in decoration, the way in which the surface can enhance or obscure forms. Particularly, she loves folk art pieces where the maker has covered whole surfaces with mosaic shards or polka-dotted with paint, as if camouflaging or transforming a common object, making it magical.

As a maker, she’s always weighing dichotomies, judging if something is wholly decorative or fits better as fine art, if it is sculptural or functional, or whether she’s creating something for a gallery space or domestic home. Her work is decidedly interior, a bit self-referential, smart and full of art historical references, unapologetically self-indulgent, and full of well-developed humor. If you find yourself looking at one of her oversized sculptural ceramic feet or a faux-painted door and wondering just what to make of it, give in to the absurdist humor and just have fun.

Wright makes situational ceramics, or ceramics that are presented in a variety of constructed situations. The term “situationist” is a throwback but still has relevance. Originally referring to a loose gathering of European artists, intellectuals, and politicos who called themselves Situationist International (1957–1972), the group grew out of Dada and Surrealism coupled with socialist politics to critique post-WWII capitalist expansion. Artist Ken Little borrowed the term when he created absurdist ceramics (arranged in “situations”) from 1974–1977 as a professor at the University of Montana with Rudy Autio. The term still carries the inherited drama and sensationalism of Surrealism but suggests playful ceramic installations such as the work Wright makes.

Wright doesn’t necessarily subscribe to Little’s situational ceramic philosophy, but there are overlapping tendencies—absurdity, engaging surfaces (floor, wall, pedestal), and combining media—that keep her approach fresh and unexpected. Her work is best when it is at its most surreal. A jar is a jar until you realize the finial is a small human hand and the form hovers above the pedestal in a series of thickly unfolding petals, whirling coronas that droop toward the vase’s foot.

Wright’s work is “purposefully imprecise,” as she notes, as if someone is first discovering that when you press wet clay, it retains the imprint of your fingers, or painted as if by someone learning what color and brushstrokes might be capable of. For example, the decorative edge on an elegant tureen is finished with repeating rows of tiny pinches.

Creating Relationships and Combinations

Wright is something of a polyglot, but the visual languages she has developed are autonomous, disparate, and incongruous, even within the same installation. For instance, a recent installation includes a large-scale foot with a marbled faux finish. The foot—set directly on the floor and seemingly from antiquity—serves as a doorstop, a visual pun (“keeping a foot in the door”), and is titled Wedg(wood), a nod to the pun as well as the ubiquitous pale blue and white ware. The door that the foot is intended to prop open is painted (with exaggerated woodgrain) directly on the wall, leading nowhere. All of this is punctuated by several ceramic works—Mirror Vases, and an embellished, lidded tureen covered in flourishes that reference baroque plasterwork, with chunks of mosaic pushed into the clay like a folk artist gone rogue, hidden under a thick, coverall glaze.

Occasionally, glaze patterns are mimicked in Wright’s accompanying paintings—a sea of checkerboard or wood grain. Although usually reserved for architecture, ornamentation—a sort of added-on embellishment—might be a better word for what Wright does. She doesn’t glaze, per se. She refers to her finishes as façade, meaning a decorative front, usually of a building—a term that also means something deceptive or superficial. Sometimes, confronted with Wright’s work, the decorative front is astounding. Has she crossed the line? How many flowers are too much? Is this garish? Could it be kitschier? Or is it transformative and transcendent?

Flowers figure prominently in Wright’s work, not only for their decorative potential, but also for their evocative quality. Her grandparents owned a floral business and an antique shop, and her grandfather was a hobbyist painter—a holy trifecta of influence that continues to drive Wright forward. Flower shops are fickle, seasonal businesses, driven by holidays and special events that place great emphasis on decoration and ornament—all of which Wright absorbed and which finds a place in her artwork. Her approach to painting seems also inherited from her grandfather—a competent hobbyist, painting for the joy of it, with no subject taboo or too difficult.

Wright is a lover of things past, has a good head for art history, and has a lot of experience presenting exhibitions. It was while working at Sherry Leedy Contemporary that the power of objects and the power of placement came to the forefront of Wright’s mind. She visited collectors’ homes and saw objects from the gallery placed in domestic contexts. This shifting of contexts is one of Wright’s touchstones. She often creates ceramics with environments in mind and as individual pieces are dispersed at the end of an exhibition, they continue to live on in someone’s collection or home. This recontextualization, like compulsive embellishment, is also an act of transformation.

Her approach is that of an aggregator—a gatherer, a randomizer, a constructor from disparate elements. As is always true with postmodernism, you can’t tell the real from the unreal, the referent from the thing it refers to. As a maker, Wright is boundless and bound by her loves. Anything’s possible, but possibility is limited. Her intention in creating environments is to create new relationships and combinations from known (but wide-ranging) art historical styles and periods. She readily acknowledges her fascination with Postmodernist tenets such as appropriation, juxtaposition, recontextualization, and hybridity—“it [Postmodernism] isn’t really old,” she says, “but something I feel is still unfolding.” Courting low-brow elements and mixing in the high, Wright dares you to call her out on the clash of surfaces or forms or media or references. A maximalist at heart she says, “I’ve fully embraced a decadent, all-in attitude.” Indeed, Wright is that smart, driven maker who always finds a way, creating what she wants.

the author Brandon Reintjes is senior curator at the Missoula Art Museum. He is married to ceramic artist Alison Reintjes, founder of Grow Safe: Non-Toxic Missoula (www.growsafemissoula.org).