Alabama Clay Conference
Artists
Chris Gryder
Chris Gryder, from Roanoke, Virginia, offers with his work a completely unique technical process that is as inspiring as his work. Using a casting process with silt he is able to capture totally unique surfaces for his large relief tile installations. His forms are suggestive of botanical and mechanical imagery, melded together in orderly and harmonious arrangements. Gryder’s large-scale tile installations are placed in collections and institutions nationwide.
Gyder’s atypical process creates work unlike any other. All pieces are fashioned in the negative. Explained in basic terms, he first builds a box and fills it with packed silt. With his hands and simple tools he carves a negative into the silt which will become the exterior of the vessel. From there he pours commercial slip (with roughly the density of a thick milk shake) into the carved cavity. The slip dries slightly over several hours until Gryder scoops out all the slip that is still liquid. When the clay has dried completely he breaks the mold and has a completed greenware piece. The surface is covered with neutral colors of terra sigillata.
Gryder’s tile surfaces have a sandstone-like quality. The aesthetic of Gryder’s tiles unite his former training and influences in modern design with his passion for the sensual and primordial. His forms could represent primitive ceremonial diagrams, molecular models, or planetary trajectories, conjuring associations with the metaphysical and the scientific. A sense of the mathematical pervades the work, like crop circles in a field of perfectly straight rows of corn. One wonders if an indecipherable map has been laid out, its function hidden behind its mysterious beauty. His pieces also reference the natural world. At first one is confident in deciphering leaf forms, but on closer examination leaves could be feathers, wings, or crystalline growth. A suggestion of insects, fruit, seeds, and pods seem feasible. The eye can follow forms that insinuate ocean waves, branches on a tree, animal trails, veins on a leaf, or water ripples. The rises in the relief hint at a possible model of a landscape. And while features of the natural world are hinted at, it wouldn’t be far-fetched to see the spinning cogs and mechanisms of a moving contraption. The whole impression is one of liveliness and action.
The success of Chris Gryder’s work lies in his ability to combine and integrate so many opposing approaches to expression. His imagery invokes disparate ideas, from the analytical approach of science to the spiritual demonstrations of primitive culture. The work captures a feeling of the ancient and the new, the naïve and the sophisticated, spontaneity and order. Gryder’s skill in encompassing and uniting divergent themes offers the viewer an exceptionally rich experience.
Lorna Meaden
With her elegant and sensuous vessels, Lorna Meaden puts her own spin on historical ornamentation and celebrates the practical use of everyday, utilitarian objects. “Handmade pots are potent in their power to reveal the extraordinary, within the ordinary,” she says. She contrasts elements of extravagant embellishment with a rough-hewn, home-spun, sensibility. One of America’s most popular potters, Meaden exhibits in galleries and museums nationwide. She has been a resident at the most prestigious art instruction centers in the country, and currently resides in Durango, Colorado where she calls herself a studio potter.
Inspired by the Arts and Crafts Movement of the nineteenth century, Meaden honors the handmade useful object as a valuable entity and a sacred tradition. She spurns the modern proclivity to assign worth based on convenience rather than authenticity and uniqueness, revering instead the intimate connection fostered in handmade items—between the user of the piece and the artisan who made it. If handmade work is a luxury in today’s world, Meaden’s use of adornment on her work extends the idea of extravagance. Yet while her forms are playfully suggestive of Baroque and Rococo grandeur, her use of material remains in the dominion of old-fashioned folk pottery. Rather than using delicate white porcelain with shiny luster embellishments, her materials retain the bulky, neutral-glazed solidity that give her work the delightful balance between the fancy and the uncomplicated.
Sergei Isupov
Sergei Isupov, one of the world’s most famous and loved ceramic artists, has been thrilling viewers for decades with this meticulous, surreal, figurative sculpture. Born in the Ukraine, Isupov studied art at universities in Kiev and Estonia before emigrating to the United States in the early 1980s. His work is in museum collections around the globe, and he lectures and gives workshops world-wide. Isupov now resides in Massachusets, and is represented by Ferrin Gallery.
Isupov’s sculptures display an uninhibited celebration of imagination, human relationship, personal mythology, and freeform narrative. Painted images of the human form drape over, wrap around, meld with, and become a part of the surface of the sculpture, which is itself in the shape of a human form. The layered imagery is ripe with layers of meaning, conveying human pathos, tenderness, ambiguity, and humor. With jaw-dropping attention to detail, his work plays with themes of raw sexuality and the playful and delicate connections in all kinds of human relationships. His methods are meticulous but have nothing to do with realism. His forms and style are relegated to the odd and colorful world of dreams and memory. His means of communication are non-apologetic and arresting, and convey an intimate, personal and dramatic display of what could best be described as enthusiasm.