Mud Like a
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Opening reception, Sunday, November 14, 2-5 pm Discussion with artists, 4 pm The Hunterdon Museum of Art will host the exhibit, Mud Like a Blessing: Elemental Clay Sculpture, from November 14,1999 to January 9, 2000. The show will feature five outstanding ceramic sculptors whose work embraces the medium's earthy sensuality and open-ended spiritual possibilities: Peter Callas, Sara D'Alessandro, Shellie Jacobson, Jim Jansma, and Lauren Silver. The idea for this exhibit was developed by Guest Curator, Michelle Mercadal. She describes the concept for the show as being "inspired by a phrase from Mary Oliver's poem Rice. (see poem, below). The phrase mud like a blessing captures the spiritual quality that underlies the special connection these ceramic artists fell about working with the primary elements of clay and fire. "The sculpture in this exhibit conveys the honoring of clay as a material and the organic process by which it becomes a sculptural form. The forms carry a contemplative feeling and convey the mysteries and secrets of combining earth and fire," Mercadal says. Peter Callas exhibits his work extensively in the US and internationally. He is also a virtuoso kiln-master, having begun his study of wood-firing in 1974 in Shigaraki, Japan. He maintains a special connection with Japanese ceramics and firing methods, visiting and exhibiting in Japan frequently. Wood-firing compliments the energy of Callas' dynamic, expressionist ceramic sculptures. Callas thinks of his expertise in wood- firing as "painting with fire." He maintains a studio and an anagama kiln (a wood-fired, tunnel kiln, built into the side of a hill, with origins in Korea, China, and Japan), which he built in 1976, in Belvidere, New Jersey. Sara D'Alessandro has exhibited throughout the US since 1973. Her totemic terracotta sculptures are frquently exhibited outdoors; her piece Swamp Cabbage Colonnade, a six element installation, is currently on exhibit for two years in the Skokie Northshore Sculpture Park in Skokie, IL. In the spring of this year, she Johnson Atelier in Trenton, NJ, fabricating sculptures which will become one-of-kind pieces cast in bronze. Her earthy, sensual sculptures appear to be inspired by natural forms such as coral or fungi. Her studio is in Riverhead, Long Island, New York. Shellie Jacobson has been exhibiting nationally since 1985, after receiving her doctorate in Creative Arts Education from Rutgers State University. She taught ceramics at Raritan Valley Community College from 1989 to 1998. Her primitive-fired porcelain and other ceramic forms have received honors and awards and have been included in a number of publications. The energy and detail of her intimately scaled work comes from studying small-scale natural forms such as seedpods, animal bones, and galls. She works in her studio in Skillman, New Jersey. Jim Jansma has exhibited and taught in the Northeast since receiving his MFA in ceramics from Alfred University in Alfred, NY in 1988. He is well-known in New Jersey where he was the Director of Ceramics for ten years at Peters Valley Crafts Education Center in Layton, and where he built a wood-firing kiln. He now teaches ceramics at Princeton University. He has recently had one-person shows in New York City and in Princeton. He creates ceramic sculpture - imposing and mysterious life-sized human figures and abstractions of these figures - in his studio in Princeton, New Jersey. Lauren Silver lives and works in West Allenhurst, NJ. In 1995 she was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to study at the Cyprus and American Archeological Research Institute. She and her family lived in Cyprus for a year where much of the island is covered with clay fragments going back to the Bronze Age. Her study of bronze Age ceramics informs her intricate, pinched sculptural forms. Several pieces in this exhibit were made in Cyprus using local clay and primitive firing. The not-for-profit Hunterdon Museum of Art, founded in 1952, is housed in an 1836 stone mill on the South Branch of the Raritan River in Clinton. Gallery hours are Tuesdays through Sundays, 11 - 5 Admission is by donation For further information please call 908-735-8415 Contact: Michèle Mercadal, Guest Curator 908-689-1563, or mercadal@nac.net Kristen Accola, Director of Exhibitions, 908-735-8415 Hunterdon Museum of Art Website Rice It grew in the black mud. It grew under the tiger's orange paws. Its stems thinner than candles, and as straight. Its leaves like feathers of egrets, but green. The grains cresting, wanting to burst. Oh, blood of the tiger. I don't want you just to sit down at the table. I don't want you just to eat, and be content. I want you to walk out into the fields where the water is shining, and the rice has risen. I want you to stand there, far from the white tablecloth. I want you to fill your hands with mud, like a blessing. - Mary Oliver Main Gallery Directory |
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