Spotted this piece today, which is part of yet another summer group show thing, at Carolina Nitsch Project Room ( 534 W. 22nd St. nyc till Aug. 8 ). It is called "A Bed Of Grass", and is ( I'm told ) made up of slab-built, sliced porcelain units that are then embedded into a porcelain slip, soda-fired and presented in an array on top of wooden blocks of slightly varying height. It has a tousled, non-uniform quality that does suggest movement, and enough variation in tone to keep it from looking hard or sterile. On a more prosaic note, I can't help thinking of the tipping ends of pyrometric cones when I see these. I've always been a bit drawn to those little curvy shapes that are the castoffs after a firing. But yet I do wonder how the individual blades were made, since there is more variation to their shapes that just slicing up slabs would suggest. Pretty labor-intensive if this is a one-element-at-a-time kind of construction. Anyhow, this artist has a website that shows some of his other work, which includes some interesting, drawing-based pieces on clay tablets and other types of objects, and since he provides some contact info there, maybe I will just see if I can pose my questions directly to him, then report back. Kudos and big thanks to helpful gallery staff as well.
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