Like many older artists, I’ve come to realize that certain ideas: semi-disguised by their presentation in different forms and materials, but identifiable nonetheless-- have recurred periodically since my career began. These themes are more like relatives than friends, in that you don’t choose them, but rather, you are born into your relationship with them. Over the past few months, though, there has been a shift. I feel a need to move the narrative along towards something new.
Searching for a path forward, I’ve found myself drawn to the work of the Chicago Imagists. Their heyday in the late ‘60s and early ’70s coincides with my earliest awareness of art, and of my own ambition. I remember my guilty love for various members of the group-- Ed Paschke, Roger Brown, Jim Nutt, Barbara Rossi-- but, even more vividly, my simultaneous feelings of attraction and repulsion when I contemplated  anything by Christina Ramberg. Her vision of the constrained female form was radical in that braless, disheveled era, and I was too young to understand what she was saying. Still, the message sank in, taking hold.  
The pieces you see here, still at the stage of unabashed homage to some elements of what I perceive her work to be about, evoke the female form, even more than ceramic vessels usually do (lips, bellies, shoulders) in a state of restraint or containment. Hair and drapery, which have made many appearances in my work over the years, are common interests. Hair is power—what else could it be, for it to be so dangerous that entire cultures insist on covering it?—and the faux-wrappings these sculptures feature are meant to evoke everything from girdle to bandage. Some suggest burlesque; others, in which the textures of hair are mostly hidden, ask the viewer to imagine what lies beneath.

For me, vessels have pretty much always functioned as gendered stand-ins: serving as surrogates, making their way across the minefield of childhood (both my own, and my daughters’). In the post-pandemic years, I made such vessels with clay--one of the first materials I ever tried, only to put it down for decades. In each of the works you see in this group, dating from 2023 and 2024, an imaginary fold in the fabric of time has brought together forms from different eras and cultures. Meeting each other and becoming one, parts of their shapes conjoin to make something new, in a lighthearted bit of historical legerdemain.

More mashup sculptures (see Mashups 1 for a full explanation of this descriptor). Over the last year I have been experimenting with both black and white surfaces, which are made in entirely different ways, as well as surface textures. The bump-like protuberances on many of these pieces were originally inspired by a form used by Nasca potters on the Peruvian south coast between 180 BCE and 500 CE, based on the root of the achira plant. Over time these protuberances have been transformed in o something quite different, as often happens.

During the height of the pandemic, I taught a ceramic history class over Zoom. No field trips to museums, no visits to artists’ studios, just lectures with images… week after week. Trying to make up for all that students were missing in this single-track version of education, I tried to give them more, covering cultures and traditions from every continent (nearly), from the Neolithic to Now. The whole thing ended up being as educational for me as it was for them: a tidal wave of shapes, colors and textures crashing over me, leaving behind many beautiful ghosts.

A month after the class ended in December 2020, I began making drawings. Each of the strangely-animated forms I conjured up incorporated elements from the cultures I’d talked about, in a sort of exquisite corpse/ mashup of shapes and purposes. Sung Dynasty and Meso-American. Art Deco and Caddoan (one of the native cultures of the North America). Dutch and Moche. After a few weeks, it occurred to me that I could make some of these inventions out of clay. Many years have gone by since my apprenticeship to a sociopathic potter in Japan and the decade of ceramic practice that followed, during which I refined my skills with that material. But, well, it really is like riding a bicycle. Your body never forgets what it knows.

I confess to taking pleasure in other people being able (or not) to identify the source of a shape, a handle or a foot. In the end, though, these are neither old nor new; practical nor magical, but vessels for the imagination.

During the height of the pandemic, I taught a ceramic history class over Zoom. No field trips to museums, no visits to artists’ studios, just lectures with images… Week after week. Trying to make up for all that students were missing in this single-track version of education, I tried to give them more, covering cultures and traditions from every continent (nearly), from the Neolithic to Now. The whole thing ended up being as educational for me as it was for them: a tidal wave of shapes, colors and textures crashing over me, leaving behind many beautiful ghosts.

A month after the class ended in December 2020, I began making drawings. Each of the strangely-animated forms I conjured up incorporated elements from the cultures I’d talked about, in a sort of exquisite corpse/ mashup of shapes and purposes. Sung Dynasty and Meso-American. Art Deco and Caddoan (one of the native cultures of the North America). Dutch and Moche. For the most part, these were executed with a tiny brush and India ink, stroke by stroke; they range in size from 8 x 10 inches to 14 x 17 inches.

I confess to taking pleasure in other people being able (or not) to identify the source of a shape, a handle or a foot. In the end, though, these are neither old nor new; practical nor magical, but vessels for the imagination.

In F(r)iction, words hidden inside other words-- like secret weapons or ghosts-- are combined with fragments of books. In other works, poetic injunctions suggest ways to repair disordered meanings-- or , perhaps, to fight back against the inexact use of language.