Kelly Connole Interview
Kelly Connole is a maker, Professor of ceramics at Carleton College in Minnesota, and the curator of Sexual Politics: Gender, Sexuality and Queerness that debuted at the Northern Clay Center in 2015.
In studying the intersection between LGBTQ identity and ceramics, there seems to be a strong correlation between the use of ceramics and the process of identity formation for LGBTQ individuals. In your opinion, what about ceramics lends itself to this type of use?
I think the ceramic medium is awfully inviting to makers in the sense that the material is so receptive. Early on in a person’s interaction with clay, the tactile nature of clay is a draw for many people. I also notice that many of the people who are embracing queer aesthetics in ceramics are using processes that do not embrace the tactile nature of clay. Instead they use processes like slip casting, or ways of working that are more typically associated with commercial ceramics, or kitsch objects from the (19)50’s and (19)60’s, or pop culture objects, and they transform these very recognizable ways of working with clay and turn them into something else. Because clay has a second-class citizen position in relationship to the art world made it a welcoming place for all different sorts of artists. I always laugh that at NCECA, our ceramic conference, there are multiple factions of individuals who are into fired ceramics, or people who put decals onto pre-made plates, or people making work in the figurative tradition. Despite all these different ways of working we all seem to be quite friendly with each other and welcome innovations in the way that we’re thinking about or processing materials. I like the field itself is very open and receptive to individuals who may self-identify as out of the norm.
In the catalog essay for Sexual Politics you reference the ability of ceramics “capture specific moments in time and freeze them indefinitely.” Given the history of same sex expression within ceramics, what about the present moment drew you to choose the contemporary works and artists in Sexual Politics?
That show was born out of an exhibition committee meeting at the Northern Clay Center where we were brainstorming new ideas for exhibitions. Just earlier that week, I had shown my ceramics class at Carleton an image of Judy Chicago’s “Dinner Party”. I found it was very interesting to see the craft based mediums of ceramics and textiles in that context. I had that piece on my mind and I said to the group, “Isn’t it interesting that the piece is now middle aged?” I left the meeting with that image still in my mind and begin thinking that it would be very interesting to see what has happened since then. It parallels my own experiences as a maker and as I reach middle age, what are the things that are still important to me? What does it mean for feminism, the Civil Rights Movement, and Stonewall Riots to have reached middle age? That’s where the idea came from. The moment in time was so important to me because I live in Minnesota, and we had just experienced a major political upheaval because of an amendment on the ballot that wanted to ensure for the rest of time that to ensure LGBTQ would not be able to marry. Within just one calendar year, we had an amendment on the ballot that would allow us to marry. While I am certain that marriage is not at all the pinnacle of equality, it is one very visible piece to the larger population. I felt like I had whiplash, in that we went from one extreme to the other within a calendar year. Things had changed so quickly, it felt very important to document that. While I was writing the catalog essay, marriage equity was in the Supreme Court and it was shortly after the exhibit opened that the Supreme Court allowed for marriage equity on a national scale, which again changes everything. I also saw all these younger artists so overtly and openly dealing with queer topics in their work. As someone who has been in the ceramic field for twenty years, I had not seen that happen, apart from Mark Burns, and Leopold Foulem. There have certainly been individuals making queer work over time, but it was exciting to see this new generation of young artists and I felt we needed to jump on that a little bit. All of those together were the moments in time I wanted to freeze.
Was this backdrop of marriage equity happening in Minnesota the reason the show focused so heavily on the domestic?
That’s a very interesting question and I have a couple of ways to answer that. I think a lot of people making work with queer themes are very much connected to domestic objects. Jeremy Brooks’s plates, or Ron Geibel’s pieces that, not specifically domestic, but are about family life. The piece Ron had in Sexual Politics was about bowling with your family and the bowling pins were modeled from sex toys. This clash between serene domestic scene and something deviant going on underneath. Certainly, in ceramics there is a lot of room for objects focusing on domesticity. In selecting the objects for the exhibition, I wanted to sure that the artists were allowed the space to make new work to mark that moment in time. I had certainly gone through many images of their work and we had a back and forth about what they were making, but I also wanted to leave it up to them. So, for example, when I asked Jeremy Brooks to join the show, I wasn’t sure whether he would show the green hands piece I was drawn to early on, or would he show plates. As a curator, there was an element of heightened stress in not knowing precisely what was going to come, but I really loved it and I felt that it was much more of a collaborative effort and it was quite exciting to watch this process and watch the works come out of the kilns and immediately come to me. While I could lie and say I had this vision of all these domestic objects, it was really the artists making the work. Kathy King had just started making these large shield pieces that her wife then added frames to so they resembled brooches. I had no idea she had just started this collaboration with her wife. With Dustin Yager, I knew right away that I wanted his explicit plate series, but the two more performative pieces he had in the show were made immediately for the show.
As you think about this unique moment in time that your artists captured, what do you think was the origin point in post-modern queer ceramics that led to them being able to make this work? I know in the catalog essay; many people cite the work of Mark Burns as foundational their practice.
I would actually go one step before Mark Burns and say Howard Kottler, as Mark’s teacher, who picked Mark out as a young man, and the relationship between those two men made space for queer thought in ceramics. You could look at where Jeremy is, and go a few generations back to Howard and see that progression. Howard encouraged Mark, and then Mark, because of the times and who he is as an artist and person, was much more out front about his identity. I remember so distinctly the first time I saw Mark Burns at an NCECA conference. We joke at the conference because you can tell who is that the conference center for ceramics and who is there for something else. There’s a certain look for people who spend a lot of time in a clay studio. Mark Burns blew that out of the water. He had this wonderful short shirt buzz top, a big moustache, and at the dance he was wearing leather chaps. I thought, “Oh my gosh, I just need to stand near that person so that whatever is coming out of him and into the air will land on me.” There’s no question that because he existed and existed as a true manifestation of himself, that he had an impact on a whole generation. I also think that Paul Mathieu’s book Sex Pots had a huge impact on gay men within the field of ceramics. I want to be very careful that I don’t write that book off as only being about the gay male experience, but its heavily weighted in that way. Over the last twenty years of being a teacher, it’s important to be able to hand someone that book and say, “You’re interested in this sort of imagery, here are people doing that type of work, historically and within the contemporary world.” I remember reading Moira Vincentelli’s book, Gendered Vessels in Ceramics, and crying as I read it. It’s a pretty dry art history book, but I honestly cried, because I felt like this was the book I was wanting someone to write. The was only one reference to a queer piece, but it was a big marker for me. I’m not alone in this either. As a queer person, especially in the (19)80’s and (19)90’s, anyplace you could find some mention of something that made your life make sense in the ceramic community, was significant.
I find it interesting that you found a stronger concentration of LGBTQ identity within ceramics among men, possibly because of the foundations you’ve discussed.
As I was researching artists to include in Sexual Politics, I was struggling to find the young, female voice. It’s hard to say why that is, but I think there are greater markers for gay men. Now we complicate it in a wonderful way, by thinking about trans artists. Fifteen years ago, I don’t think you could even have a conversation about trans artists in clay, and now that’s absolutely part of the conversation. It’s thrilling to see everything open in a positive way.
You’re in a unique position as a professor to observe the innovations coming out of the next generation. How are your students responding to the current political climate? Or are there any queer students whose work you find especially powerful and resonant with what’s going on?
One of the artists in Sexual Politics, Dustin Yager, is one of my alums. It was really a career high for me to watch him grow from a very young college student to a practicing artist making fantastic work, especially around queer themes. I don’t teach at an art school, I teach at a very small, private, liberal arts school, so many of my students will not go on to be professional artists. I think it was my third year at Carleton, where the majority of my Advanced Ceramics was gay, and I remember thinking it had very little to do with ceramics and more about finding an adult person who identified as gay to have in their life. I remember doing the same thing as a young adult, and taking classes with someone because I just wanted to be around them more. I would say, certainly there are some students who deal with these themes. Since our last conversation, I was talking with this group of students who put on the Laramie Project, and I said something about Fred Phelps. One of them asked, “Was Fred Phelps a real person?” I thought it amazing that such hatred he embodied that became a marker to me as a human being, was unknown to this new generation. Some of them, may not have been alive, and thus not aware, of who Matthew Shepard was. While I am seeing many artists who making work that is passionately about LGBTQ issues, for other artists, it is just one piece of their identity, and they’re making work that’s completely other than that. And quite honestly, while I would love to see more artists, especially young women, making work about the queer experience, I find it especially refreshing, that they feel a sense of freedom in the world that is proof they we have moved our culture in some ways.
I had the opportunity to speak Carol Sauvion at Craft in America, and her perspective was that there was always a sense of safety in the crafts because of the focus on the object, material and process. Those facets could stand in lieu of someone’s identity, if an artist wanted them to. I think that’s especially true of craft as opposed to Modern art where you do have this association of the artist and their ego.
I think that’s a brilliant way of thinking about why the crafts have been havens for queer folks.
I’d like to reverse a little bit and return to the works of Jeremy Brooks. You mentioned earlier what drew you to his pieces, could you expand on that?
I was introduced to Jeremy’s work through Pattie Chalmers, who teaches with him in Illinois. The first work I saw of his were the green hands. I was drawn to them as an object that has such deep resonance as praying hands, but then the act of taking that slip-cast commercial artist, and the act of taking those hands apart and making it about something that was completely other was very exciting to me. I also saw some of his assemblage pieces with trophy parts that looked a bit like dildos. I thought his work was quite clever and it was exciting to see someone play with their sexuality in a way that I had not seen as much of before. I always want to come back to Mark Burns as the person I mark as the beginning of that way of working. Penises had come up a lot in contemporary ceramics, in the work of Dean Adams, for example. But I thought Jeremy was doing it in a way that was very interesting. When we started talking about including him in the exhibition, his Rim Series, seemed absolutely appropriate for this exhibition in that Minnesota has such a huge biking culture. The association with domestic life, the word play, re-appropriating found decals is something Jeremy has become very adept at and is very much in the tradition that Howard Kottler began. Jeremy’s interest in words and the way he introduces the artists to the jargon of homosexuality over the last two centuries is quite interesting and is one of the things that drew me to the work.
I had the opportunity to visit Jeremy and go through his studio. He showed me many of the decals he found and told me about how they use to be a very fixed entity and how you could only take and utilize what there was, and there was no adding to the cannon. Now that people can make their own decals and they don’t necessarily have to be remixed in that way, have you seen people generating a queer iconography in that way?
Absolutely. The stool piece that Dustin Yager had in the Sexual Politics show and was later in the NCECA fiftieth anniversary exhibition was covered with decals that are new, mostly using imagery from newspapers. The imagery varies from CiCi McDonald, a trans woman who was murdered here in Minneapolis, to images of Ronald Reagan and the drug crisis, AIDS. He layers them in a collaging way that breaks every rule of decals in that traditionally they are men to be clipped very cleanly and are meant to be placed distinctly on a glossy surface. Jeremy’s work is subversive in that it cuts through the decals and repositions them, but the method of application is very clean and precise, like the traditional decal. Dustin Yager is someone who is using decals in a collage technique that is very different from that. Wesley Harvey is another decal person who has a lot in common with Jeremy Brooks. He’s a queer man, living in Arizona, and is a very dynamic, very interesting artist. He’s another person I would put in that decal camp in terms of another person recontextualizing the way in which that iconography is delivered.
When I was speaking with John Chaich, the curator of Queer Threads, he mentioned that one of the concerns he dwells upon is whether she show essentialized the identity of the artists he featured, or even fetishized their works as a result. Is this something that emerged as a concern for you throughout the show?
I appreciate that question. I guess I thought about that in the context of the Sexual Politics show because one of the artists does not identify as queer. The title of the show, Sexual Politics: Gender, Sexuality and Queerness in Contemporary Ceramics is a lot to put on a how that can only include six artists. Certainly, it was the appetizer of the conversation. There’s a whole lot more that can be done. It was less about essentializing those identities and thinking about the work. Christina West is the artist who does not identity as queer, but the way her work places figures in relationship to each other is some of the best queer work I have ever seen. I think she handles awkwardness in intimate relationships in a profound and interesting way. I hope she didn’t feel like it was mistake to include her in that exhibition. It’s always problematic to take someone’s identity and have that be the common factor in including them in that exhibition. I tried very hard, and I would say, curators in general, try very hard not to choose artists solely based on their identity. If I just wanted queer clay artists, I could have found fifty people, so you start with that list and it becomes about the work, and how is the work going to look next to each other, and how is the show going to resonate on just this single identity. Also, I think about the audience. How is an audience in the upper Midwest going to come into this exhibit? What is the expectation for awareness and education and what is the programming around that going to look like? I guess I worried less about fetishizing the artist, their identity, or the work, and thinking more about how to mark the moment in time and whether this work will be made a decade from now. I think you leave it to history to answer that.
As I research more into craft processes and delve deeper into interviews with artists, phrases emerge like the “love hours” that describe the laborious process it takes to make a craft object, or “finish fetish” that characterizes a highly smoothed and fine piece of ceramics. It seems like there’s a element of fetishizing within craft in terms of discussing the materials and the processes. What are your thoughts on this?
It’s certainly of many artists in the show I curated. I would say Jeremy and Mark Burns’s work that is so unbelievably clean and controlled. Or Ron Gibel’s work that features hand thrown elements and when you get close, you can see the movement and the artist’s hand, but you take one step back and immediately they become that highly finished, shiny, brilliant, object. Certainly, ceramics throughout history, in German and French ceramics, especially with the figurine and ceremonial objects, you have this fetishizing of the object’s surface. I appreciate that Dustin Yager’s Fuck Cups Series, is really turning that aesthetic around and are so raw and visceral in the treatment of the clay, surface and the text on them. There is that focus on finish and the counterpoint to that as well. It’s hard not to put in those love hours with clay. As a teacher, I have to tell my students all the time that sometimes the best thing to do is walk away because you can become obsessed with touching everything, sometimes too much. As pendulums swing, it’s exciting to go through the (19)60’s and (19)70’s to go from Peter Voulkos who utilized clay for raw expression to now see there’s room still for looseness for celebrating clay as a clay material but also that highly tended to surface. When I started ceramics in the (19)80’s that was so not ok in the same way that slip casting was destroying the materiality of clay. Why is it that in queer ceramics there is more attention to surface? I’ll let you wrestle with that. But I do want to point out the counterpoint to it as well, it’s certainly not all queer artists.
I think that’s an excellent note to end on. Thank you for taking the time to discuss the show with me, it’s been tremendously helpful.
In studying the intersection between LGBTQ identity and ceramics, there seems to be a strong correlation between the use of ceramics and the process of identity formation for LGBTQ individuals. In your opinion, what about ceramics lends itself to this type of use?
I think the ceramic medium is awfully inviting to makers in the sense that the material is so receptive. Early on in a person’s interaction with clay, the tactile nature of clay is a draw for many people. I also notice that many of the people who are embracing queer aesthetics in ceramics are using processes that do not embrace the tactile nature of clay. Instead they use processes like slip casting, or ways of working that are more typically associated with commercial ceramics, or kitsch objects from the (19)50’s and (19)60’s, or pop culture objects, and they transform these very recognizable ways of working with clay and turn them into something else. Because clay has a second-class citizen position in relationship to the art world made it a welcoming place for all different sorts of artists. I always laugh that at NCECA, our ceramic conference, there are multiple factions of individuals who are into fired ceramics, or people who put decals onto pre-made plates, or people making work in the figurative tradition. Despite all these different ways of working we all seem to be quite friendly with each other and welcome innovations in the way that we’re thinking about or processing materials. I like the field itself is very open and receptive to individuals who may self-identify as out of the norm.
In the catalog essay for Sexual Politics you reference the ability of ceramics “capture specific moments in time and freeze them indefinitely.” Given the history of same sex expression within ceramics, what about the present moment drew you to choose the contemporary works and artists in Sexual Politics?
That show was born out of an exhibition committee meeting at the Northern Clay Center where we were brainstorming new ideas for exhibitions. Just earlier that week, I had shown my ceramics class at Carleton an image of Judy Chicago’s “Dinner Party”. I found it was very interesting to see the craft based mediums of ceramics and textiles in that context. I had that piece on my mind and I said to the group, “Isn’t it interesting that the piece is now middle aged?” I left the meeting with that image still in my mind and begin thinking that it would be very interesting to see what has happened since then. It parallels my own experiences as a maker and as I reach middle age, what are the things that are still important to me? What does it mean for feminism, the Civil Rights Movement, and Stonewall Riots to have reached middle age? That’s where the idea came from. The moment in time was so important to me because I live in Minnesota, and we had just experienced a major political upheaval because of an amendment on the ballot that wanted to ensure for the rest of time that to ensure LGBTQ would not be able to marry. Within just one calendar year, we had an amendment on the ballot that would allow us to marry. While I am certain that marriage is not at all the pinnacle of equality, it is one very visible piece to the larger population. I felt like I had whiplash, in that we went from one extreme to the other within a calendar year. Things had changed so quickly, it felt very important to document that. While I was writing the catalog essay, marriage equity was in the Supreme Court and it was shortly after the exhibit opened that the Supreme Court allowed for marriage equity on a national scale, which again changes everything. I also saw all these younger artists so overtly and openly dealing with queer topics in their work. As someone who has been in the ceramic field for twenty years, I had not seen that happen, apart from Mark Burns, and Leopold Foulem. There have certainly been individuals making queer work over time, but it was exciting to see this new generation of young artists and I felt we needed to jump on that a little bit. All of those together were the moments in time I wanted to freeze.
Was this backdrop of marriage equity happening in Minnesota the reason the show focused so heavily on the domestic?
That’s a very interesting question and I have a couple of ways to answer that. I think a lot of people making work with queer themes are very much connected to domestic objects. Jeremy Brooks’s plates, or Ron Geibel’s pieces that, not specifically domestic, but are about family life. The piece Ron had in Sexual Politics was about bowling with your family and the bowling pins were modeled from sex toys. This clash between serene domestic scene and something deviant going on underneath. Certainly, in ceramics there is a lot of room for objects focusing on domesticity. In selecting the objects for the exhibition, I wanted to sure that the artists were allowed the space to make new work to mark that moment in time. I had certainly gone through many images of their work and we had a back and forth about what they were making, but I also wanted to leave it up to them. So, for example, when I asked Jeremy Brooks to join the show, I wasn’t sure whether he would show the green hands piece I was drawn to early on, or would he show plates. As a curator, there was an element of heightened stress in not knowing precisely what was going to come, but I really loved it and I felt that it was much more of a collaborative effort and it was quite exciting to watch this process and watch the works come out of the kilns and immediately come to me. While I could lie and say I had this vision of all these domestic objects, it was really the artists making the work. Kathy King had just started making these large shield pieces that her wife then added frames to so they resembled brooches. I had no idea she had just started this collaboration with her wife. With Dustin Yager, I knew right away that I wanted his explicit plate series, but the two more performative pieces he had in the show were made immediately for the show.
As you think about this unique moment in time that your artists captured, what do you think was the origin point in post-modern queer ceramics that led to them being able to make this work? I know in the catalog essay; many people cite the work of Mark Burns as foundational their practice.
I would actually go one step before Mark Burns and say Howard Kottler, as Mark’s teacher, who picked Mark out as a young man, and the relationship between those two men made space for queer thought in ceramics. You could look at where Jeremy is, and go a few generations back to Howard and see that progression. Howard encouraged Mark, and then Mark, because of the times and who he is as an artist and person, was much more out front about his identity. I remember so distinctly the first time I saw Mark Burns at an NCECA conference. We joke at the conference because you can tell who is that the conference center for ceramics and who is there for something else. There’s a certain look for people who spend a lot of time in a clay studio. Mark Burns blew that out of the water. He had this wonderful short shirt buzz top, a big moustache, and at the dance he was wearing leather chaps. I thought, “Oh my gosh, I just need to stand near that person so that whatever is coming out of him and into the air will land on me.” There’s no question that because he existed and existed as a true manifestation of himself, that he had an impact on a whole generation. I also think that Paul Mathieu’s book Sex Pots had a huge impact on gay men within the field of ceramics. I want to be very careful that I don’t write that book off as only being about the gay male experience, but its heavily weighted in that way. Over the last twenty years of being a teacher, it’s important to be able to hand someone that book and say, “You’re interested in this sort of imagery, here are people doing that type of work, historically and within the contemporary world.” I remember reading Moira Vincentelli’s book, Gendered Vessels in Ceramics, and crying as I read it. It’s a pretty dry art history book, but I honestly cried, because I felt like this was the book I was wanting someone to write. The was only one reference to a queer piece, but it was a big marker for me. I’m not alone in this either. As a queer person, especially in the (19)80’s and (19)90’s, anyplace you could find some mention of something that made your life make sense in the ceramic community, was significant.
I find it interesting that you found a stronger concentration of LGBTQ identity within ceramics among men, possibly because of the foundations you’ve discussed.
As I was researching artists to include in Sexual Politics, I was struggling to find the young, female voice. It’s hard to say why that is, but I think there are greater markers for gay men. Now we complicate it in a wonderful way, by thinking about trans artists. Fifteen years ago, I don’t think you could even have a conversation about trans artists in clay, and now that’s absolutely part of the conversation. It’s thrilling to see everything open in a positive way.
You’re in a unique position as a professor to observe the innovations coming out of the next generation. How are your students responding to the current political climate? Or are there any queer students whose work you find especially powerful and resonant with what’s going on?
One of the artists in Sexual Politics, Dustin Yager, is one of my alums. It was really a career high for me to watch him grow from a very young college student to a practicing artist making fantastic work, especially around queer themes. I don’t teach at an art school, I teach at a very small, private, liberal arts school, so many of my students will not go on to be professional artists. I think it was my third year at Carleton, where the majority of my Advanced Ceramics was gay, and I remember thinking it had very little to do with ceramics and more about finding an adult person who identified as gay to have in their life. I remember doing the same thing as a young adult, and taking classes with someone because I just wanted to be around them more. I would say, certainly there are some students who deal with these themes. Since our last conversation, I was talking with this group of students who put on the Laramie Project, and I said something about Fred Phelps. One of them asked, “Was Fred Phelps a real person?” I thought it amazing that such hatred he embodied that became a marker to me as a human being, was unknown to this new generation. Some of them, may not have been alive, and thus not aware, of who Matthew Shepard was. While I am seeing many artists who making work that is passionately about LGBTQ issues, for other artists, it is just one piece of their identity, and they’re making work that’s completely other than that. And quite honestly, while I would love to see more artists, especially young women, making work about the queer experience, I find it especially refreshing, that they feel a sense of freedom in the world that is proof they we have moved our culture in some ways.
I had the opportunity to speak Carol Sauvion at Craft in America, and her perspective was that there was always a sense of safety in the crafts because of the focus on the object, material and process. Those facets could stand in lieu of someone’s identity, if an artist wanted them to. I think that’s especially true of craft as opposed to Modern art where you do have this association of the artist and their ego.
I think that’s a brilliant way of thinking about why the crafts have been havens for queer folks.
I’d like to reverse a little bit and return to the works of Jeremy Brooks. You mentioned earlier what drew you to his pieces, could you expand on that?
I was introduced to Jeremy’s work through Pattie Chalmers, who teaches with him in Illinois. The first work I saw of his were the green hands. I was drawn to them as an object that has such deep resonance as praying hands, but then the act of taking that slip-cast commercial artist, and the act of taking those hands apart and making it about something that was completely other was very exciting to me. I also saw some of his assemblage pieces with trophy parts that looked a bit like dildos. I thought his work was quite clever and it was exciting to see someone play with their sexuality in a way that I had not seen as much of before. I always want to come back to Mark Burns as the person I mark as the beginning of that way of working. Penises had come up a lot in contemporary ceramics, in the work of Dean Adams, for example. But I thought Jeremy was doing it in a way that was very interesting. When we started talking about including him in the exhibition, his Rim Series, seemed absolutely appropriate for this exhibition in that Minnesota has such a huge biking culture. The association with domestic life, the word play, re-appropriating found decals is something Jeremy has become very adept at and is very much in the tradition that Howard Kottler began. Jeremy’s interest in words and the way he introduces the artists to the jargon of homosexuality over the last two centuries is quite interesting and is one of the things that drew me to the work.
I had the opportunity to visit Jeremy and go through his studio. He showed me many of the decals he found and told me about how they use to be a very fixed entity and how you could only take and utilize what there was, and there was no adding to the cannon. Now that people can make their own decals and they don’t necessarily have to be remixed in that way, have you seen people generating a queer iconography in that way?
Absolutely. The stool piece that Dustin Yager had in the Sexual Politics show and was later in the NCECA fiftieth anniversary exhibition was covered with decals that are new, mostly using imagery from newspapers. The imagery varies from CiCi McDonald, a trans woman who was murdered here in Minneapolis, to images of Ronald Reagan and the drug crisis, AIDS. He layers them in a collaging way that breaks every rule of decals in that traditionally they are men to be clipped very cleanly and are meant to be placed distinctly on a glossy surface. Jeremy’s work is subversive in that it cuts through the decals and repositions them, but the method of application is very clean and precise, like the traditional decal. Dustin Yager is someone who is using decals in a collage technique that is very different from that. Wesley Harvey is another decal person who has a lot in common with Jeremy Brooks. He’s a queer man, living in Arizona, and is a very dynamic, very interesting artist. He’s another person I would put in that decal camp in terms of another person recontextualizing the way in which that iconography is delivered.
When I was speaking with John Chaich, the curator of Queer Threads, he mentioned that one of the concerns he dwells upon is whether she show essentialized the identity of the artists he featured, or even fetishized their works as a result. Is this something that emerged as a concern for you throughout the show?
I appreciate that question. I guess I thought about that in the context of the Sexual Politics show because one of the artists does not identify as queer. The title of the show, Sexual Politics: Gender, Sexuality and Queerness in Contemporary Ceramics is a lot to put on a how that can only include six artists. Certainly, it was the appetizer of the conversation. There’s a whole lot more that can be done. It was less about essentializing those identities and thinking about the work. Christina West is the artist who does not identity as queer, but the way her work places figures in relationship to each other is some of the best queer work I have ever seen. I think she handles awkwardness in intimate relationships in a profound and interesting way. I hope she didn’t feel like it was mistake to include her in that exhibition. It’s always problematic to take someone’s identity and have that be the common factor in including them in that exhibition. I tried very hard, and I would say, curators in general, try very hard not to choose artists solely based on their identity. If I just wanted queer clay artists, I could have found fifty people, so you start with that list and it becomes about the work, and how is the work going to look next to each other, and how is the show going to resonate on just this single identity. Also, I think about the audience. How is an audience in the upper Midwest going to come into this exhibit? What is the expectation for awareness and education and what is the programming around that going to look like? I guess I worried less about fetishizing the artist, their identity, or the work, and thinking more about how to mark the moment in time and whether this work will be made a decade from now. I think you leave it to history to answer that.
As I research more into craft processes and delve deeper into interviews with artists, phrases emerge like the “love hours” that describe the laborious process it takes to make a craft object, or “finish fetish” that characterizes a highly smoothed and fine piece of ceramics. It seems like there’s a element of fetishizing within craft in terms of discussing the materials and the processes. What are your thoughts on this?
It’s certainly of many artists in the show I curated. I would say Jeremy and Mark Burns’s work that is so unbelievably clean and controlled. Or Ron Gibel’s work that features hand thrown elements and when you get close, you can see the movement and the artist’s hand, but you take one step back and immediately they become that highly finished, shiny, brilliant, object. Certainly, ceramics throughout history, in German and French ceramics, especially with the figurine and ceremonial objects, you have this fetishizing of the object’s surface. I appreciate that Dustin Yager’s Fuck Cups Series, is really turning that aesthetic around and are so raw and visceral in the treatment of the clay, surface and the text on them. There is that focus on finish and the counterpoint to that as well. It’s hard not to put in those love hours with clay. As a teacher, I have to tell my students all the time that sometimes the best thing to do is walk away because you can become obsessed with touching everything, sometimes too much. As pendulums swing, it’s exciting to go through the (19)60’s and (19)70’s to go from Peter Voulkos who utilized clay for raw expression to now see there’s room still for looseness for celebrating clay as a clay material but also that highly tended to surface. When I started ceramics in the (19)80’s that was so not ok in the same way that slip casting was destroying the materiality of clay. Why is it that in queer ceramics there is more attention to surface? I’ll let you wrestle with that. But I do want to point out the counterpoint to it as well, it’s certainly not all queer artists.
I think that’s an excellent note to end on. Thank you for taking the time to discuss the show with me, it’s been tremendously helpful.