Blackfish Gallery Mini-Retrospective

Mandy Stigant and I have put together a show at Blackfish for June 2021. She is exhibiting drinking vessels, and her show statement is below…

Here is the you-tube link to our artist talk : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXMXIDQ0BoE

For me, it turned into a mini-retrospective. I have plenty of current work, but have also hoarded some of the best woodfired work of my post-grad years, which would be 15 or so. My part of the exhibit is a look at the reasons for some tangents into the use of other media, a small collaboration, and many stellar dishes that came out of a reduction cooled anagama called East Creek :)

***Most work is for sale and available in Blackfish’s easy to use SHOP ***

Top the Over

Much of my earliest childhood was aboard a sailboat, and I have ever since found great pleasure when I need to form an elegantly useful knot. As a potter on-the-go, I came to using rope as a definitive closure for covered bowls. I made mostly lunchboxes, also exploring other materials such as rubber for the closure. And then I discovered Kinbaku, a form of ancient Japanese rope bondage whose original application was the effective rapid capture of prisoners on the field of battle. It uses few knots but instead a few strategically located turns of the rope. The pair of large bottles references this art form.

I find it fascinating that thin flexible rope can so effectively control the vessels of the sea and body. In my mind it is such a natural combination that I found no distinction between my creative enjoyment of the materials at hand and the questions of who is a vessel and what is control. My work has always been sensually tactile. The porcelain begs for it. It’s also fair to say that I have always blended my understanding of the porcelain and myself, consciously or not. But I did find that my enjoyment of erotic bondage was best on the body of me, not on my expressive clay… body. So this period of exploration remained mostly in the realm of utility instead of sculpture. This show captures a little bit of that exploration as well as serving as a mini-retrospective of some of the best of my work from my early career.

Note about the collaboration with Michael Becwar: this is a playful reference to maritime history, in which sailors formed ever more intricate knots that built on themselves into a sturdy fender. Such a mass would become a bumper located at, for example, the bow (front) of a tugboat as it needs to push up against another vessel. Michael has done restoration work of this nature at the Center for Wooden Boats located on Lake Union in Seattle, and has very much enjoyed his time spent on the docks there. Gallery sale of this work will benefit their educational programs for young people.

Mandy’s statement:

Up the Bottom

This is a show about drinking.

Alcohol and bread seem to be ubiquitous to humanity. Every culture that could grow some kind of grain figured out how to bread it, and every culture that realized old food could have intoxicating effects figured out how to ferment for imbibing. It’s a staggering range of commonality for humanity: from Appalachian bourbon to Irish whiskey to Italian wine and grappa, to Greek ouzo or Russian vodka, to Japanese sake, Chinese bijou, or Korean soju, to English beer and gin, to Ethiopian mead, Venezuelan rum and Mexican tequila. We’re all human, we all have food that goes bad, and we all drink.

Whether part of sacred rituals, or for medicinal purposes, or for conviviality and celebration, or spilling over into the trials of excess and addiction, spirits have potently manifested themselves as inherent to our cultures.

“Up the bottom” is what a former sculpture professor used to say by way of a toast, instead of “bottoms up.” The baskets filled with shooters are a tribute to a memory of potluck dinners during my grad school years; John Neely has a very large bowl filled with little shooter cups from multiple generations of students and fellow artists. Some of us used to linger at his house well into the wee hours of the morning; he would get out the liqueurs he likes to make and pull down that large bowl. And we would raid that bowl, pulling out all those little cups to explore, each of us trying to find the right one for the evening, the right absent friend to share the moment with.

These bottles and cups hearken to a sense of ritual, not so much high and lofty and religious so much as vessels intended to house one’s spirit of choice and wait for the moment of sharing and imbibing. Each bottle and cup is unique, thanks to the hell they went through in the wood kilns, and I like to think their uniquity compliments that in the people who engage and use them. I’m not picky about what kind of spirit these vessels house - though my personal bias is for bourbon. To be picky would negate my interest in the variety of both spirits and the people whose tastes go this way or that. Whether you fill it with whiskey to share with a friend, or keep it as a bedside water bottle to quench your midnight thirst, the real point is: which one is the right one for you?