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In this time we call the postmodern, the ceramic arts have grown increasingly, even wildly, diverse. Since mid-twentieth century, gallery-goers have regularly encountered gorgeously handcrafted pots of undoubted utility alongside increasingly adventurous sculptural work that (more-or-less comfortably) straddles craft and fine art traditions.
The American artists Bean Finneran and Jerry Bennett—and their works featured in Pushing the Limits—stand at the sculptural end of this continuum. And yet their “seed jars” and “cones,” “rings,” and “cores” challenge our notions of what ceramic sculpture should be. By their apparent fragility, they leave us musing: How are these structures built? What do they signify? How do these artists achieve their startling effects, of near-transparency, of apparent randomness that still achieves a pleasing order, of lightness in the face of an obdurate gravity?
At opposite ends of the North American continent (Bennett in Philadelphia and Finneran on San Francisco Bay), the two artists explore natural and cultural forms in ways that are kindred and yet radically dissimilar. Each creates his or her work by assembling multiple objects. One sees himself firmly within the ancient and honorable tradition of the ceramic arts, while the other avows that she is simply a contemporary sculptor who happens to use clay. One, stripping almost all color from his work, seeks the perfect shade of white; the other saturates her stacks of “curves” with impossibly vibrant colors. Their mutual achievement is to refresh the art of clay, bringing to this most mutable of materials qualities of whimsicality, inventiveness, and an undeniable sense of play, together with an almost spiritual aura—lovingly built into the works through untold hours of patient labor.
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Vessel shapes. Gridded structures that allude to open-weave textiles, chain-link fence, the skeletons of buildings under construction, and the box trusses of suspension bridges. Plant-like tendrils with plenty of gesture: Jerry Bennett’s seed jars and baskets are hybrid creatures, referring both to the burgeoning natural world and to the ingenious artifacts humans have always left in their wake.
Bennett’s sculptures derive their peculiar delicacy (and strength) from the porcelanous paper clay the artist uses in their construction. Bennett is a key figure in what he terms the “exploding” field of paper clay (he was an honored guest at the 2005 First International Paper Clay Symposium in Kesckmet, Hungary, and he has led paper clay workshops at Philadelphia’s Clay Studio and the International Ceramic Studio in Hungary as well as in India).
Paper clay, simply put, is clay mixed with paper fibers, rendering it extraordinarily strong, even when wet. As sculptor Valerie Lyle puts it, paper clay offers “the multiple benefits of greenware strength, moisture wicking for fast even drying, and wet on dry applications.” Writing in Ceramic Review, Felicity Aylieff notes that paper clay has “had a phenomenal impact on the development of ceramics in recent years, significantly broadening the scope of the ‘achievable’ in clay and providing opportunities to create work of considerable scale, strength and complexity.” 1 Bennett especially values the ability of paper clay to resist warping and its strength prior to firing, allowing him to move his delicate structures to the kiln without breakage.
Another American sculptor who regularly uses paper clay, Rebecca Hutchinson, points out that clay strengthened by adding cellulose (whether it is paper or straw or other plant fibers) is nothing new. For millennia, humans have built enduring structures of earthen bricks fortified with cellulose—think of the numerous vernacular building traditions based on adobe (a Spanish word derived from the Arabic), from Asia to North Africa to the Americas. 2 Jerry Bennett has managed to make this ancient and earthy material his own, weaving improbably ethereal structures that seem to radiate (or gather) light. (In addition to his work in ceramics, Jerry Bennett is a weaver, and his gridded structures could just as easily derive from textile weaving traditions as from architectural models or the outlines of African seed jars.)
Like the contemporary ceramic artists who punch or drill holes in their vessels and other forms in an effort to counter the solidity of clay, 3 Bennett hopes—by painstakingly building his jars of thin coils (“about the thickness of a soda straw”)—to truly push the limits, rendering his works translucent, or better yet, to make them nearly vanish, leaving behind only a glimmer of texture and a hint of structure. In this impossible pursuit of simplicity and transparency, Bennett has, in recent years, radically reduced his palette, moving almost exclusively to white (“this heightens the interest of the surface,” he notes).4
Bennett avows a lifelong interest in patterning; “it’s built into me,” he says. He notes that paper clay allows him to explore “very thin, highly textured surfaces in the intricately assembled vessel forms.”3 He adds that his thin coils, “through their repetition . . . form a pattern which not only envelops the surface but also defines the line and structure of the forms.”5 This integration of means infuses these delightfully eccentric and antic works with barely controlled energies; they seem about to topple, or lift off, or reach out and touch us.
Aiming to create “more than just a vessel,” Bennett sees each of his seed jars as a metaphor for the importance of protecting genetic quality, a crucial issue in this time of ongoing threats to the biosphere and destruction of species. The tendrils that animate each piece, reaching out to the light (or to passersby), invoke plant forms and, for the artist, the agglomerations of tiny creatures that make up coral reefs (threatened in much of the world). This ecological concern underlies all of Bennett’s work, infusing his airy forms with a marvelous liveliness and, at the same time, a sense of the fragility of our earthly existence (Bennett expresses the fear that we humans—and our technology—will “destroy it all”).
Jerry Bennett’s works in Pushing the Limits claim our attention, and our affection, by celebrating complexity and diversity and by being quite simply beautiful—exotic (and richly spiritual) forms that seem to have emerged unbidden into the light. Philadelphia Inquirer critic Victoria Donohoe recently wondered, “Might [Bennett’s] next step be to spiritualize things a bit” so that his “art can be seen as the vehicle for something other than glamorous surface?” With this extraordinary body of work, Jerry Bennett has achieved just such a spiritualization, but without disguising what Donohoe has praised as the “unmistakable buoyancy . . . energy—and . . . idiosyncrasy” that have been his trademarks.6
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Bean Finneran makes her home on the verge of a salt marsh in Marin County, just north of San Francisco. Infatuated by her surroundings, by powerful tidal forces and extravagant sea creatures, this sculptor has found a manner of working that celebrates the natural wonders she witnesses every day and, at the same time, places her on the cutting edge of ceramic sculpture. Having first worked in clay as a production jewelry maker—and coming from a background in the performing arts—Finneran brings to her sculpture an approach inspired less by ceramic vessel traditions and more by late 20th century vanguard sculpture movements, especially post-Minimalism. Unlike Jerry Bennett, who sees himself firmly ensconced within ceramic tradition (and his work as a meditation on traditional forms), Finneran is, in her own estimation, simply a sculptor who works with a material that serves beautifully to enact her vision.
Like Jerry Bennett, Finneran favors repetition and assembling works out of multiples. In her case, all of the works in this exhibition are built of “curves,” curved rods of fired clay that she colors vividly with acrylic stains. Even though, within a single work, the curves are similar in size and identical in color, Finneran rolls the pieces by hand, rendering them unique, just as every blade of grass or snowflake is unique.
Finneran eschews the mechanical production of her multiples because she wants the “action of the hand.” to be evident. “It’s insane, I know,” she says of her laborious process, but then she speaks of her commitment to a slow and thoughtful transformation of materials and space. Like the artist Allan McCollum, instead of creating—in the words of art historian Rosalind Krauss—an ‘endlessly proliferating series of increasingly meaningless signs,” Finneran’s one-of-a-kind multiples “seem instead to have the character of something absolutely unique.”7
In an essay on Ann Hamilton (a sculptor Finneran admires), the critic Rebecca Solnit writes, “Making art is in some ways a gesture against [the] speed and fragmentation of production, a restoration of the full process from imagination to execution, of the relationship between mind and hands.”8 Finneran speaks of a corresponding desire to infuse her work with a sense of time, of fully lived experience that can never be successfully mimicked by industrial processes. Like Jackie Winsor and other post-Minimalists, she is acutely aware that, as Bruce Kurtz has expressed it, her investment of long hours in meditative labor allows the “resulting form” to visually re-enact “the slow process of its becoming.”9
Critic Maria Porges has spoken of Finneran’s “performative” art,10 and given the artist’s long association with the San Francisco–based Soon 3 Theatre Company (from 1972 to the present), it is no surprise that a key stage in Finneran’s creative process is the installation of the works themselves. She prefers working with a large crew (as if they were a circus putting up the big top). The team creates each cone or ring from scratch, as it were, piling up the curves one by one, interweaving them in a form specific to that site and that moment. And then when Finneran and her team take the show down, they store away the hundreds and thousands of curves until they can be assembled again—in another space, in other combinations. Although she is “not trying to copy nature,” Finneran loves the endless transformations of the natural world. “Things in nature are always changing,” she says, and she aspires to capture that quality of transformation, of birth and death and rebirth, in her cylinders and cones that critics have compared variously to sea anemones, eccentric topiaries, and coral reefs.11
Finneran is careful to point out that her work does not contain “some big message”; she is instead simply trying to “deal with beauty.” Of course, in today’s often cynical and jaded art world, to “deal with beauty” is a revolutionary act, and in the presence of Finneran’s astonishing cones and rings, we are struck by their preternatural playfulness, the sheer high spirits of these creatures that speak to our desire, too often forgotten, to experience again the transient but indelible richness of the phenomenal world.
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At the same time that they push the limits of the ceramic arts—by embracing new materials and new approaches—Bean Finneran and Jerry Bennett remind us that the transformative power of the human eye and mind and hand can still surprise, can still bring unalloyed pleasure, and can lead us beyond the purely human, stimulating a profound re-connection with the spirits of nature.
1. Valerie G. Lyle, “Figurative Sculpture in Paper Clay” (MFA Thesis, Department of Art and Design, East Tennessee State University, 2001), 22; Felicity Aylieff, “Working with Paperclay and Other Additives,” Ceramic Review 189 (May–June 2001), 56.
2. Rebecca Hutchinson, interview with the author, Helena, Montana, July 2005.
3. See Rick Newby, The Aesthetics of Disappearance: Ceramic Perforation in a Postmodern Age (Minneapolis, MN: Northern Clay Center, 2005).
4. All quotations from Jerry Bennett and Bean Finneran are drawn, unless otherwise noted, from phone and email interviews with the author conducted in June–July 2005.
5. Jerry Bennett Pottery website, “Artist’s Statement,” www.jerrybennett.net/pages/11/.
6. Victoria Donohoe, Philadelphia Inquirer, March 20, 2005, quoted in Jerry Bennett Pottery website, “Reviews,” www.jerrybennett.net/pages/11/.
7. Rosalind E. Krauss, “X Marks the Spot,” in Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois, Formless: A User’s Guide (New York: Zone Books, 1999), 219.
8. Rebecca Solnit, “The Making: Landscapes of Emergency,” As Eve Said to the Serpent: On Landscape, Gender, and Art (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001), 166.
9. Bruce D. Kurtz, “Post-Minimalism,” in Contemporary Art 1965–1990 (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1992), 136.
10. Maria Porges, “Bean Finneran’s Performative Art,” Ceramics: Art and Perception 57 (2004), 12–14.
11. See Porges, “Bean Finneran’s Performative Art”; Teri Cohn, “Bean Finneran at Mills College Art Museum,” Artweek 36:3 (April 2005), 17; Colin Berry, “’Subtraction & Addition’ at the Museum of Craft & Folk Art,” Artweek 35:6 (July/August 2004), 17.
Poet and critic Rick Newby is co-author of the museum catalogs A Ceramic Continuum: Fifty Years of the Archie Bray Influence; Humor, Irony and Wit: Ceramic Funk from the Sixties and Beyond; and The Aesthetics of Disappearance: Ceramic Perforation in a Postmodern Age. His articles and reviews have appeared in American Craft, American Ceramics, Ceramics: Art and Perception (Australia), Ceramic Review (United Kingdom), Kerameiki Techni (Greece), Sculpture, and High Ground. He makes his home in Helena, Montana.
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