The audio file for this article was produced by the Ceramic Arts Network staff and not read by the author.
The Ceramics Monthly editorial staff recently caught up with ceramic artist Misty Gamble to check in on her theatrical childhood influences, meat bouquet coiffures, and her exhibition-space choreography. Here is our conversation. —Eds.
Editors: Did your father’s practice as a puppet maker and performer model a way of living as an artist for you? How did growing up around puppetry influence your creative sensitivity to gesture, posture, and expression in the absence of movement?
Misty Gamble: I have been surrounded by figuration my entire life. As the daughter of an internationally renowned performing puppeteer, well known for his intricate marionette design and style, my childhood and early adulthood were spent not only traveling to international theaters, puppetry festivals and tours, but also in the workshop watching puppeteers sculpt and create complex marionettes. Additionally, I spent a decade as an event booker and publicist, creating and promoting music events and festivals before going to graduate school. My practice is equally inspired by a full trifecta of the arts: the performing arts, music, and the visual arts.
My father laid the groundwork for me to design a life centered on making, community, travel, and adventure. Through the years, we shared common artistic interests, igniting my passion to become a visual artist. He also modeled a way of living that emphasized practice, experimentation, and the endurance for long studio and traveling days. From the beginning, I understood the intense concentration, effort, and work it took my father to be both the primary artist and director of a successful touring company.
As a result of these early experiences, I have a sensitivity to arrested gesture, posture, and expression. Subject matter central to my practice, such as performance and the use of the body, is originally drawn from puppetry. To this day, I continue to make work that grapples with balancing weight, exaggeration, and theatricality.
Eds: How does working in clay—its fragility, physicality, and permanence—influence the way the figure functions conceptually in your work?
MG: As for materials, clay compels me because of its properties of immediacy. I have a fondness for working responsively and intuitively. In graduate school, the Rodin-esque, highly activated, and sometimes figurative surfaces of Magdalena Abakanowicz, Peter Voulkos, and Stephen de Staebler seduced me. This is when I started paddling and pounding surfaces. I adopted this physicality, inspired by Abstract Expressionism. The action of beating clay is a masculine component of working that empowers me. I love the beautiful immediacy, strength, and gestural surfaces created with this technique, then and now.
In my most recent body of work, “Of Flesh and the Feminine,” the figure functions conceptually as a pedestal, armature, or vessel to present objects. These armless busts have heads with enormous baroque, fantastical coiffures of gigantic meat bouquets, consisting of animal fragments and other accouterments. Metal-woven “cages” or upside-down French revolutionary era pocket skirts crown each head, holding cornucopias of synthetic hair, tassels, horns, faux flora, faux fruit, and ceramic cast drumsticks, wings, and feet.
Recurrent themes exist in this series. The trope “their gaze is unapologetic, even through hair so big it hides the ability to see” guides me. I use the idea of repeating symbols of consumption, decoration, and excess to accessorize the figure. The bases of the figures literally need to be heavier to hold up the baskets of faux flora and meat. The heaviness of the compositions insinuates the burdened existence of the forms. Surfaces with raw, immediate markings abstract awkward bodies. I obsessively fill, decorate, and accessorize to reference excess and consumption.
My creative process is both technical and conceptual in nature. Often, I start building a body using solid clay and paddling it to add texture. Once formed, I hollow out and put pieces back together, pinching walls thinner as I build toward the top to alleviate weight. Technically, piling so many clay items on top of a sculptural head requires making the neck thicker. Visually, it makes sense that the spine starts to curve, and the jaws extend to emphasize the stress of holding an actual and psychological load. Conceptually, this posturing also challenges notions of feminine beauty by exaggerating posture in an unflattering way.
Eds: How do intersections of feminism and ecofeminism shape your decision to center women’s bodies in your work?
MG: Though my previous work was informed by my interests in issues surrounding femininity and standards of normalcy and propriety, my current studio practice sits at the intersection of feminism and environmentalism, focusing on the relationship between human animals and non-human animals. My work is inspired by research from the book, The Sexual Politics of Meat by Carol J. Adams, which has become the classic articulation of the hidden connections between meat eating and patriarchy, vegetarianism and feminism.
Carol J. Adams work was pivotal to my current evolution, as it gave me a critical framework to think about my work in the studio. I looked at the overlap of feminist and vegan critical theory that discusses how language is used to alter perception. Adams writes about the intertwined actions of consumption, fragmentation, and objectification as part of a larger process of subjugating women and animals in animal agriculture. Briefly, animals become absent referents via language—the word cow referencing beef. The very terms used to identify living animals become absent when they are exchanged for terms that indicate their consumptive value (food). Most disturbingly, animals in such agricultural settings are absent referents as their bodies disappear and are transformed into cuts of meat, rendered unidentifiable through fragmentation and commodity presentation in supermarkets.
I also draw from the work of Vandana Shiva, an ecofeminist thinker who conjures concepts of gender to analyze the relationships between humans and the natural world. Another inspiration is Kimberlé Crenshaw’s distinction of the word “Intersectionality” as a framework that attempts to identify how interlocking systems of power impact those who are most marginalized in society.
The impact of these influences naturally led me to construct images of the female and animal bodies simultaneously. Furthermore, Of Flesh and the Feminine provides me opportunities to incorporate past, present, and seemingly incongruent interests into compelling compositions, weaving together fancy chicken breeds, Kabuki theater, Harajuku street fashion, Asian fashion icons Kyary Pamyu Pamyu and Minori Shironuri, and Peking opera.
Eds: Representations of excess, both in consumption and adornment, recur in your work. Can you discuss how you use overindulgence to communicate with your audience? How does restrained use of color highlight or contrast that excess?
MG: Adornment and/or consumption are conspicuous throughout much of my work. My early experiences as a young person led me to question notions of appropriate behavior and attire after being exposed to pageantry and society balls. Feminist theory gave me a direction. In Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women, Naomi Wolf discusses the obsession with female beauty as a political tool used to control women. She declares that these preoccupations undermine female progress in areas of work and equality.
Carol J. Adams connects consumption and adornment when she breaks down the ways patriarchal culture objectifies both animals and women, reducing each to “absent referents” for mindless consumption. She argues that meat-eating, sexual objectification, and adornment are linked through shared practices of fragmentation and consumption, where bodies are consumed for pleasure or status. Adams calls for a feminist-vegetarian ethic that recognizes the intersectional oppression of women and animals, challenging the societal structures that normalize this consumption.
Using repetition and ordered chaotic piles of consumed objects both overwhelms and draws the viewer in. At the same time, my restrained use of surface color quiets the visual noise. In Of Flesh and the Feminine, I use this strategy conceptually and compositionally for several reasons. First, it transforms the animal into the monochromatic shades of meat. Using color sparingly doesn’t interrupt the silhouette of the female body and animal meats, but creates an overall sculptural composition. Excess is inherently limitless. I extend this notion to form, constructing bodies with more hair, more adornment, and more animal meat in an attempt to see how far I can push weight, balance, and theatricality. Using a combination of 18th-century tropes, specifically Rococo, a large number of ceramic objects converge in my pieces to dazzle and astonish, but also question.
Eds: How do you choreograph space and proximity in your installations to create narrative connections or delineate between your figures?
MG: Within the larger practice of contemporary art, I see my work living in the expanded field of ceramics as my practice moves beyond the making of a single ceramic object. I construct exhibition spaces to manifest sculptural experiences for the viewer, always considering the theater of space—a tendency that recalls my interest in performance.
Of Flesh and the Feminine is comprised of 1500 ceramic objects and mixed media. I work like an Ikebana (Japanese art of flower arrangement) floral designer, assembling and uniquely designing the work on site, directing the viewer to see the work in-the-round, and extending the piece beyond the boundary of its pedestal.
Environmental concerns inspire the work. For me, there is nothing more currently pressing than engaging in discourse about the earth and its inhabitants. I choreograph spaces to create discussions about environmental issues that take place during or after the exhibition. I am using art to draw communities into talking about and acting on social, political, or environmental issues.
Eds: What moments—residencies, opportunities, recognitions, travel experiences—felt like turning points in your career?
MG: In 1998, my father and I were invited to perform in Iran at the 7th International Puppet Festival and were subsequently honored as the first Americans to perform in Iran since the Islamic Revolution of 1979. Each night of the festival, my dad performed to multiple sold-out theaters in the main opera house of Tehran. My dad’s marionette, Michael Jackrabbit executed “hip-hop” exercises that invigorated the audience to leap up out of their chairs and dance [illegally] to American pop music. Law enforcement officers lined the corridors of the halls. I remember thinking in those moments that art and performance could be agents for change. Each has the ability to communicate across barriers such as language, class, and culture.
Graduate school and residencies with the Studio Nong collective both played a significant role as I developed ideas and learned from my colleagues at the Guangxi Arts Institute. It was during the three years between academic positions that I was able to transform my thoughts and processes into new content and truly digest the research of Carol J. Adams’ work. In that time, my ideas blossomed in residencies at Woodstock Byrdcliffe, New Harmony Clay Project, Hambidge Center for Arts and Sciences, Rowan University, and Vermont Studio Center.
Eds: At this stage in your career, what questions are you asking yourself in the studio?
MG: Looking to the future, I have questions I’d like to explore through sculpture: How can I make work that creates opportunities to support dialogue? Can art be a catalyst for social change? How can I extend art dialogue beyond the exhibition space? In terms of the immediate future, I’m busy scheming ways to meld futurist architecture, mid-century modern design, submarine periscopes, human-animal figurative fragments, and crowing roosters conceptually and visually.
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The audio file for this article was produced by the Ceramic Arts Network staff and not read by the author.
The Ceramics Monthly editorial staff recently caught up with ceramic artist Misty Gamble to check in on her theatrical childhood influences, meat bouquet coiffures, and her exhibition-space choreography. Here is our conversation. —Eds.
Editors: Did your father’s practice as a puppet maker and performer model a way of living as an artist for you? How did growing up around puppetry influence your creative sensitivity to gesture, posture, and expression in the absence of movement?
Misty Gamble: I have been surrounded by figuration my entire life. As the daughter of an internationally renowned performing puppeteer, well known for his intricate marionette design and style, my childhood and early adulthood were spent not only traveling to international theaters, puppetry festivals and tours, but also in the workshop watching puppeteers sculpt and create complex marionettes. Additionally, I spent a decade as an event booker and publicist, creating and promoting music events and festivals before going to graduate school. My practice is equally inspired by a full trifecta of the arts: the performing arts, music, and the visual arts.
My father laid the groundwork for me to design a life centered on making, community, travel, and adventure. Through the years, we shared common artistic interests, igniting my passion to become a visual artist. He also modeled a way of living that emphasized practice, experimentation, and the endurance for long studio and traveling days. From the beginning, I understood the intense concentration, effort, and work it took my father to be both the primary artist and director of a successful touring company.
As a result of these early experiences, I have a sensitivity to arrested gesture, posture, and expression. Subject matter central to my practice, such as performance and the use of the body, is originally drawn from puppetry. To this day, I continue to make work that grapples with balancing weight, exaggeration, and theatricality.
Eds: How does working in clay—its fragility, physicality, and permanence—influence the way the figure functions conceptually in your work?
MG: As for materials, clay compels me because of its properties of immediacy. I have a fondness for working responsively and intuitively. In graduate school, the Rodin-esque, highly activated, and sometimes figurative surfaces of Magdalena Abakanowicz, Peter Voulkos, and Stephen de Staebler seduced me. This is when I started paddling and pounding surfaces. I adopted this physicality, inspired by Abstract Expressionism. The action of beating clay is a masculine component of working that empowers me. I love the beautiful immediacy, strength, and gestural surfaces created with this technique, then and now.
In my most recent body of work, “Of Flesh and the Feminine,” the figure functions conceptually as a pedestal, armature, or vessel to present objects. These armless busts have heads with enormous baroque, fantastical coiffures of gigantic meat bouquets, consisting of animal fragments and other accouterments. Metal-woven “cages” or upside-down French revolutionary era pocket skirts crown each head, holding cornucopias of synthetic hair, tassels, horns, faux flora, faux fruit, and ceramic cast drumsticks, wings, and feet.
Recurrent themes exist in this series. The trope “their gaze is unapologetic, even through hair so big it hides the ability to see” guides me. I use the idea of repeating symbols of consumption, decoration, and excess to accessorize the figure. The bases of the figures literally need to be heavier to hold up the baskets of faux flora and meat. The heaviness of the compositions insinuates the burdened existence of the forms. Surfaces with raw, immediate markings abstract awkward bodies. I obsessively fill, decorate, and accessorize to reference excess and consumption.
My creative process is both technical and conceptual in nature. Often, I start building a body using solid clay and paddling it to add texture. Once formed, I hollow out and put pieces back together, pinching walls thinner as I build toward the top to alleviate weight. Technically, piling so many clay items on top of a sculptural head requires making the neck thicker. Visually, it makes sense that the spine starts to curve, and the jaws extend to emphasize the stress of holding an actual and psychological load. Conceptually, this posturing also challenges notions of feminine beauty by exaggerating posture in an unflattering way.
Eds: How do intersections of feminism and ecofeminism shape your decision to center women’s bodies in your work?
MG: Though my previous work was informed by my interests in issues surrounding femininity and standards of normalcy and propriety, my current studio practice sits at the intersection of feminism and environmentalism, focusing on the relationship between human animals and non-human animals. My work is inspired by research from the book, The Sexual Politics of Meat by Carol J. Adams, which has become the classic articulation of the hidden connections between meat eating and patriarchy, vegetarianism and feminism.
Carol J. Adams work was pivotal to my current evolution, as it gave me a critical framework to think about my work in the studio. I looked at the overlap of feminist and vegan critical theory that discusses how language is used to alter perception. Adams writes about the intertwined actions of consumption, fragmentation, and objectification as part of a larger process of subjugating women and animals in animal agriculture. Briefly, animals become absent referents via language—the word cow referencing beef. The very terms used to identify living animals become absent when they are exchanged for terms that indicate their consumptive value (food). Most disturbingly, animals in such agricultural settings are absent referents as their bodies disappear and are transformed into cuts of meat, rendered unidentifiable through fragmentation and commodity presentation in supermarkets.
I also draw from the work of Vandana Shiva, an ecofeminist thinker who conjures concepts of gender to analyze the relationships between humans and the natural world. Another inspiration is Kimberlé Crenshaw’s distinction of the word “Intersectionality” as a framework that attempts to identify how interlocking systems of power impact those who are most marginalized in society.
The impact of these influences naturally led me to construct images of the female and animal bodies simultaneously. Furthermore, Of Flesh and the Feminine provides me opportunities to incorporate past, present, and seemingly incongruent interests into compelling compositions, weaving together fancy chicken breeds, Kabuki theater, Harajuku street fashion, Asian fashion icons Kyary Pamyu Pamyu and Minori Shironuri, and Peking opera.
Eds: Representations of excess, both in consumption and adornment, recur in your work. Can you discuss how you use overindulgence to communicate with your audience? How does restrained use of color highlight or contrast that excess?
MG: Adornment and/or consumption are conspicuous throughout much of my work. My early experiences as a young person led me to question notions of appropriate behavior and attire after being exposed to pageantry and society balls. Feminist theory gave me a direction. In Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women, Naomi Wolf discusses the obsession with female beauty as a political tool used to control women. She declares that these preoccupations undermine female progress in areas of work and equality.
Carol J. Adams connects consumption and adornment when she breaks down the ways patriarchal culture objectifies both animals and women, reducing each to “absent referents” for mindless consumption. She argues that meat-eating, sexual objectification, and adornment are linked through shared practices of fragmentation and consumption, where bodies are consumed for pleasure or status. Adams calls for a feminist-vegetarian ethic that recognizes the intersectional oppression of women and animals, challenging the societal structures that normalize this consumption.
Using repetition and ordered chaotic piles of consumed objects both overwhelms and draws the viewer in. At the same time, my restrained use of surface color quiets the visual noise. In Of Flesh and the Feminine, I use this strategy conceptually and compositionally for several reasons. First, it transforms the animal into the monochromatic shades of meat. Using color sparingly doesn’t interrupt the silhouette of the female body and animal meats, but creates an overall sculptural composition. Excess is inherently limitless. I extend this notion to form, constructing bodies with more hair, more adornment, and more animal meat in an attempt to see how far I can push weight, balance, and theatricality. Using a combination of 18th-century tropes, specifically Rococo, a large number of ceramic objects converge in my pieces to dazzle and astonish, but also question.
Eds: How do you choreograph space and proximity in your installations to create narrative connections or delineate between your figures?
MG: Within the larger practice of contemporary art, I see my work living in the expanded field of ceramics as my practice moves beyond the making of a single ceramic object. I construct exhibition spaces to manifest sculptural experiences for the viewer, always considering the theater of space—a tendency that recalls my interest in performance.
Of Flesh and the Feminine is comprised of 1500 ceramic objects and mixed media. I work like an Ikebana (Japanese art of flower arrangement) floral designer, assembling and uniquely designing the work on site, directing the viewer to see the work in-the-round, and extending the piece beyond the boundary of its pedestal.
Environmental concerns inspire the work. For me, there is nothing more currently pressing than engaging in discourse about the earth and its inhabitants. I choreograph spaces to create discussions about environmental issues that take place during or after the exhibition. I am using art to draw communities into talking about and acting on social, political, or environmental issues.
Eds: What moments—residencies, opportunities, recognitions, travel experiences—felt like turning points in your career?
MG: In 1998, my father and I were invited to perform in Iran at the 7th International Puppet Festival and were subsequently honored as the first Americans to perform in Iran since the Islamic Revolution of 1979. Each night of the festival, my dad performed to multiple sold-out theaters in the main opera house of Tehran. My dad’s marionette, Michael Jackrabbit executed “hip-hop” exercises that invigorated the audience to leap up out of their chairs and dance [illegally] to American pop music. Law enforcement officers lined the corridors of the halls. I remember thinking in those moments that art and performance could be agents for change. Each has the ability to communicate across barriers such as language, class, and culture.
Graduate school and residencies with the Studio Nong collective both played a significant role as I developed ideas and learned from my colleagues at the Guangxi Arts Institute. It was during the three years between academic positions that I was able to transform my thoughts and processes into new content and truly digest the research of Carol J. Adams’ work. In that time, my ideas blossomed in residencies at Woodstock Byrdcliffe, New Harmony Clay Project, Hambidge Center for Arts and Sciences, Rowan University, and Vermont Studio Center.
Eds: At this stage in your career, what questions are you asking yourself in the studio?
MG: Looking to the future, I have questions I’d like to explore through sculpture: How can I make work that creates opportunities to support dialogue? Can art be a catalyst for social change? How can I extend art dialogue beyond the exhibition space? In terms of the immediate future, I’m busy scheming ways to meld futurist architecture, mid-century modern design, submarine periscopes, human-animal figurative fragments, and crowing roosters conceptually and visually.
To learn more about Misty Gamble and her work, visit mistygamble.com or follow on Instagram @mistygambleart.
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