🎧 Pattern, Obsession, and History: Visual Interpretation with Elisabeth Kley Erin Shafkind

Appears in the May 2025 issue of Ceramics Monthly.

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

What is it about loud, obsessive, even mad patterning that draws our attention? For the last 40,000 years, humans have repeated marks on walls, stones, ceramic vessels, fabric, and paper. What is this need to mark and repeat? In a visual composition, pattern is made from repeating simple elements of line, shape, and color. Pattern is a language of relationships rather than objects. Elisabeth Kley collects patterns from centuries of pattern makers and brings them onto the surface of clay forms and into her installations. Kley works creating form, yet her pots and sculptures themselves embody something akin to statues. She cleverly flattens the third dimension and adds the illusion of depth to the second dimension. 

Growing up in New York City surrounded by art and artists has been a major influence on Kley. She spent two summers in her twenties with renowned painter Joan Mitchell in France. From an early age, she knew she wanted to be an artist. Today, she lives in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan and goes to her studio in Brooklyn—an easy subway train under the East River. I met Kley this past winter in her studio—roughly a 500-square-foot (46.5-m³) space. Witnessing her process in action was mesmerizing: several unfinished pots covered in plastic, drawings, installation studies, and print proofs covering most walls, a creative ethos is palpable in every nook and cranny. The edges of the room held pieces from past shows and new forms waiting to be fired. Artist grants helped purchase a slab roller and kiln, which occupied one wall. Bookshelves overflowing with art resources, desks, and a research area filled another corner. It’s obvious this space is an extension of her creative life. She confessed, “I don’t mess with the space for studio visits, it makes me crazy.” I appreciate this candor and comfort that stems from Kley’s clear priorities.

Exercising the Mind

Alfred Jarry (1873–1907), a French absurdist playwright and visual artist, coined the term “pataphysics,” a nonsensical science based on dismantling the claim that there’s only one right way to think, believe, or behave and to beware of pretentious nonsense. After a difficult-to-comprehend lecture, he said to a friend, “Talking about things that are understandable only weighs down the mind and falsifies the memory, but the absurd exercises the mind and makes the memory work.” I appreciate this cue to exercise the mind and Kley’s work provides pure examples of buoyancy, joy, and complex beauty to work with. During the last four years, she installed two exhibits between The Fabric Workshop in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art in Omaha, Nebraska. In the catalog she states, “I’ve always loved Jarry for his absurdity and his obsession with the past. His visual art fascinates me even more than his writing.” 

For the last ten years, she’s focused on black-and-white motifs and it’s almost as though the viewer is invited into a carnival of antiquities. Having not seen her installations in real life I can imagine being immersed in the spaces with her forms and the quiet tension playing between the distilled second and third dimensions. In one installation, we see what could be a stairway with stylized vines curving around balusters. These stairs are too tall for regular steps, we’d need to tiptoe up them carefully not to lose our balance. Each step into Kley’s world is potentially an escape from the apparent equilibrium of regular life, or the opposite, and is a mirror for the unstable stage we witness and perform on. If it’s a mirror, it’s a stunningly clean and wonderfully rendered world. What might we find at the top of the stairs? 

Next to them is a wallpaper grid with small circles. The repeats surprise and delight, the contrast so pure and her lines so lovingly wobbly. A small shelf holds two triangular terra-cotta slab forms. Each triangle is a reversal of the other with its shapes counterchanged. These forms suggest a mini temple, an Egyptian headdress, or even the Eye of Providence seen on dollar bills. Below the slab forms sits a double pedestal that inverts the stair pattern on the wall. The top step presents a right triangular form decorated with an Egyptian papyrus fan design. Below it rests a coiled earthenware vessel, left open—summoning order perhaps, its clover pattern repeating around the pot. Kley’s work is gentle and yet firm with its vivid contrast. This tension is divinely inspired as the sincere call to decorate lives inside her. She loves ornamentation. I asked her about the relationship with possible spiritual or religious ideas connected with artifacts from Egyptian tombs and she said, “I like the dark and spooky. The spirituality is in the decorative. I’m not into Egyptian religion but into the pastiche.” Looking into the past, rich with generations of pattern, Kley attempts to create openings into the present and future, fantastic portals in black-and-white, and occasionally, especially in earlier installations, with hints of color. 

The Theatre of Life 

Kley would like to officially create set designs for the theatre. She shares, “I’m really into set design, to me, now, that would be very fun.” She’s creating a world of props and placing them in the theatre of life. There’s no fourth wall in her work. The actors and audience exist together in the realm of her objects and within the installations in which she places them. 

During her residency in 2021 with The Fabric Workshop (TFW) she drew and they printed large silk screens on fabric and she created a black and white painting on a very low platform. She exhibited the wall pieces with her earthenware pieces at TFW and The Bemis Center for Contemporary Art. In these installations, her ceramic sculptures stand amongst the colorful patterns like figures in quiet contemplation admiring the art. Her black-and-white pieces are in striking contrast to the colorful sweeping works on the walls and floor. Yet in three dimensions they are solid, stoic, and hold their own quite well. Occasionally a black-and-white print on the floor subtly mirrors the face of a slab. The printed work shows giant abstracted shapes repeating in geometric unison, but with slightly shaky drawn lines. Here’s one of the aesthetics of Kley’s hand at work—she draws with distinctive precision to capture repetition yet the marks wiggle and dance ever so slightly. A shiver of movement in every mark made. She describes her process as being “obsessed with art history, museums, online databases, and I take my own images, then I go through them. A progression of different obsessions: Egypt, Coptic, Islamic, Japanese, Greek, and Roman. I keep folders on my computer and then I see what catches my eye and make drawings from there.” 

Zooming in on a Historical Pattern 

Her process is connected to Chinoiserie, an elaborate style where Western designers imitated exotic patterns and narrative scenes of Eastern splendor. Kley also manipulates and interprets patterns with the use of more abstracted techniques. A fan, a leaf, a sun, all symbols flattened onto form. A garden seems to live inside her mind and she draws from images she chooses from her vast archive of historical patterns. Zigzag lines represent water, circles are suns—mimicking ancient hieroglyphics. She’s been using the same technique for decades. After creating her slab forms she draws on paper from her archive, then she tapes the paper to the forms to see how they look, she keeps changing it until it works aesthetically. Once she’s satisfied, she applies three coats of white underglaze, puts wax over the surface like a batik to create a resist, then applies a mixture of black and cobalt, finally she then bisque fires, glazes, and fires again. Why only black and white? She’s satisfied with the beauty of her choices and this simplicity and says, “People miss the color, but with these complicated forms, I don’t want to give them color.” 

Infinite Alphabets 

Toward the end of my visit, she pointed out the latest slab letter pieces lining the wall on the floor. She called them letters and I asked, “Do you think of these as creating a new alphabet?” She responded, “I’m not sure if they are a new alphabet because an alphabet would be something fixed and finite.” Perhaps they are symbols for an infinite alphabet of an unknown language. Patterns like letters in words use repetition. Kley’s marks quiver with exquisite gesture. Her obvious hand on the surface is at the core of her process. She sees the patterns made throughout cultures and time, she digests and interprets, and then she creates something that is both old and new, bringing decoration and beauty into being. 

Restriction to black and white leaves no room for gray. Starkness may promise solid ground where nothing wavers, although in Kley’s work we may teeter while tiptoeing up the stairs, or trying to balance while walking around her forms. Kley challenges us; enter into this absurd beauty, here is a festival infused with satisfaction and surprise, a theatrical garden of shape and line dizzying, joyous, and stabilizing at the same time. A call and response through history. 

the author Erin Shafkind is an artist and educator living in Seattle, Washington. To learn more, visit www.erinshafkind.com and Instagram @eshaffy.