December Issue 1999
Wood Fired Clay at gallery W.D.O. in Charlotte
In Charlotte, NC, gallery W.D.O. will be hosting an invitational exhibit entitled, Wood Fired Clay, featuring clay artists Dan Anderson, Rob Barnard, Hiroshi Ogawa, Jeff Shapiro, Toshiko Takaezu and Byron Temple. The exhibit will be on view from Dec. 1 through Jan. 15, 2000.
Shoji Hamada (1894 - 1978) and Bernard Leach (1887- 1919) are among this century's most important figures in the world of ceramics. They established new standards of craft in their own countries and influenced artists, craftsmen, and potters the world over. During the month of December, gallery W.D.O. will begin an ongoing series of shows exploring the work of contemporary potters who have ties to the Hamada/Leach tradition. Major works by major national and international potters will be offered for the serious collector of clay.
Hiroshi Ogawa, is a Japanese/American potter from Oregon who produces work of a contemplative natural beauty in a traditional wood-firing kiln. Although his pieces may appear crude or cumbersome, this "natural unself-consciousness" and lack of ostentation are what fill the heart and spirit with warmth and peace.
Jeff Shapiro has visited various places in Japan to study Japanese culture. He is a teacher who has trained many young ceramic artists in America. His work allows the clay to express its own existence, the forms have a strong vitality, and his pieces are beautifully enhanced by the firing in the Anagama process. It shows the magic of colors created with the help of the God of Fire. He is ambitiously pursing the possibilities of clay. Shapiro is now acknowledged by many as a leading ceramic artist in America.
Toshiko Takaezu has been making magnificent pottery since the 1950s. In 1979, Joseph Hurley, a critic writing in American Craft magazine, call Takaezu "a beacon to the ceramics world," and since then her stature in the field has grown. Her work was recently celebrated by a retrospective organized by the National Museum of Modern Art in Kyoto, Japan which has traveled in Japan and finally in 1998 to the American Craft Museum in New York.
Rob Barnard returned from Japan in 1978, the same year that the English potter Bernard Leach (1887-1979) published his last book, Between East and West. There is a nice continuity in this coincidence of dates. Like Leach in 1920, Barnard returned home determined to effect a synthesis of East and West in his pottery. Like Leach, Barnard is determined to make functional work that has the authority of art.
"Good pottery ennobles us," Bernard says. "It reminds us of how to conduct our lives by reflecting our frailties and strengths and offering us a riddle (koan) about how those two contradictory elements might be resolved to create a powerful human being/pot. Good pottery must therefore have opposing elements-just as human beings have in their own make-up and then seek a resolution of these contradictions. That is what makes it compelling."
Dan Anderson's artwork, an amalgam of vessel and industrial artifact, is full of irony - handmade replicas of man-made objects, soft clay renderings of metal objects, aged and impotent reminders of a once powerful age.
Anderson has taken the aesthetic and political ugliness out of industry... underscoring the power of art to uplift the human condition. He is convinced (Dan Anderson's work is fired in an Anagama kiln) that instead of merely heating the clay, the flame and ash have the capacity to alter and enhance... the etched surface created by sustained three to five day firing, imbues a "poetic" richness.
Exploration of Scandinavian design combined with the already strong influence of his years of working with Bernard Leach, in England, has enabled Byron Temple to produce work which is straight forward, almost classical in its restraint and inviting.
"I wish for purity and precision in objects that extol the virtue of harmony and proportion," says Temple.
Temple's work is not symbolic, sculptural or serf-conscious and is outside the mainstream of contemporary American ceramic arts. His work develops out of the intellectual movement started by Leach, Yanagi and Cardew, who saw hand-made pottery as having an artistic value and who established it as a living language- an " invented tradition." Byron was apprenticed with the legendary potter and philosopher, Bernard Leach in England from 1958 to 1961.
Temple's pieces are designed to allow an intimate encounter, designed to appeal to the sense of touch as well as sight. His forms are stripped of everything extraneous to function. Glazes are applied sparingly never arbitrarily. His efforts to match form to function have taken him beyond the Japanese pottery, which had been Leach's inspiration. Within disciplined limits, the pieces are deceptively simple. The work emanates a quiet strength that transcends individual purposes.
For further information check our NC Commercial Gallery listings or call the gallery at 704/333-9123.
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