Marjorie Dial, How long do we have to wait, Glazed ceramic and glass, 6” x 18” x 18”, 2024.

Ceramics are an exercise in relinquishing control–unpredictability is intrinsic in the firing processes. Within this craft, skill is not necessarily performed in this exhibition. Instead, the work demonstrates care and curiosity for the process of making. Clay’s ubiquity underscores its democratic potential: a material that is not scarce, yet capable of extraordinary meaning and transformation.

Mostly hand-built ceramic sculptures participate in a visual conversation with ikebana about control and surprise. Portland-based Renka (蓮華) Ikebana, led by Amy RM Stahl, follows the unconstrained ethos of the Sogetsu School of Ikebana. Founded in 1927 by Sofu Teshigahara, Sogetsu believes that anyone can arrange anywhere, with any material. According to Teshigahara, “Ikebana is an art of space, the space between branches, flowers, and leaves. This space is a plentiful void projecting tension and energy.” Stahl’s students featured in this exhibition include Jennifer A. Mitchner, Justin Terry, and Rebecca Shala.

Relying on assemblages of unlikely materials and forms, the sculptures all “exist between becoming and collapse” as stated by artist ahuva s. zaslavsky in our recent studio visit. The works are all imbued with the crude physicality of organic materials, offering an antidote to our immersion within slick, automated systems. Impressions of touch appear throughout: the artist’s hands grappling with their environment, their experiences, memories, and time. These gestures are not concealed but rather are emphasized, allowing the labor of making and arranging to remain visible and active.

Each work consciously violates conventions and presumptions of function and craft, in their artists’ own authentic and personal ways. Rather than merely challenging preconceptions, these sculptures are the survivors of ecstatic artistic and technical processes. They endure as living testaments to the impossible, as objects that are cerebral yet spiritual, provocative yet generous, and irreverent yet earnest.

Twisted and contorting snugly inside themselves are Lisa Conway’s large ceramic knots. These plump knots are intertwined exercises of impossibility. In Conway’s words, “My sculptures evoke emotional and physical sensations, appearing as plant-like or abstract forms that blush, sag, reach, tense, or soften”. Individual arms heavily fold over themselves evoking strength, connection and intimacy. Most of her sculptures find themselves in trefoil, three-lobed forms, paradoxical yet influenced by her natural environment. Their freckled surfaces carry a slight warmth within a cool, outer, almost alien flesh.

Despite the enigmatic allure of Marjorie Dial’s sculptures, her work is not as much about the objects themselves, as about how the objects “create conditions for presence, for transmission”. While these ceramic objects are not knowingly functioning phones, Dial assumes the illocutionary powers to regard them as tools for communication. Her works take influence from ritual objects used for incantation, offerings, mourning, and the like. Though sometimes barely enduring the ecstatic firing processes, visibly showing cracks, they survive with emotion and miraculous, shimmering luster. Her surfaces are a marriage of disparate components, found stones, ash, meaningful minerals hand-collected and alchemically combined into the glazed unknown.

Whether skateboarding or working with clay, James Alby is into routinely pushing against physical limitations. Only recently has he gotten his hands in the mess of working with clay, and his ceramics exhibit this chaotic, impulsive velocity. His work, shadowy and knowingly imperfect, is a living record of his Chamorro heritage, from the island of Guam now living in the urban environment of Portland. The objects he creates are the result of pushing himself daily, pushing what a sculpture can do, existing within a swirling collision of influences. Much of his work in this show is unglazed, using terra sigillata, engobes, slips, spray-can underglaze, and manganese and iron washes. Worn flotsam or tangled buoys, his work speaks a bit to this collision, bobbing at the surface, imbued with the chaotic energy of past lives in present action.

The unearthed funk of Nick Norman’s work is on proud display here, with gooping, variegated salt-kiln glazed surfaces, anarchic stumps, slumps, and all. As if liberated from the heavy baggage of how to work with clay. His interest is not in reinventing the wheel, making grandiose forms or classical showpieces. Instead, he is drawn to folk art, thrifted booty, and treasures hidden in plain sight. This folk influence is not merely an aesthetic interest, but stirs up a conversation about class.

Multiple mediums such as drawing, painting, ceramics, and printmaking merge in Ben Killen Rosenberg’s ‘Pluses’. Collected objects such as legos, toys, vintage office stamps, incidental residue of time’s past, and other fun bits and bobs are impressed into the supple surface of the clay slab. The slabs exist not merely as sculptural elements, but they ricochet into something further. Clay monotypes are haphazardly generated from these spirited and unfired slabs, coming together into plus-sign compositions, conceptually and physically, composed of multiples. His small paintings, curious and sentimental, emerge playfully within dynamic displays.

Domestic infrastructures are especially toyed with in ahuva s. zaslavsky’s site specific installation, Bouquet garni. Her work references tubes, tunnels, and vessels as circulatory systems of buildings. These forms appeal to zaslavsky for their capacities to contain and regulate flow. When conduits fail, what was once hidden becomes visible, and reveals fragility and rupture. Numerous independent and modular units consisting of blended clay bodies are somewhat precariously stacked in tower structures, atop an artist-made table. The recycled materials in the table further illustrate the themes of construction. While the vessels were built up, the clay body collapsed down by the weight of gravitational forces, creating a sagging, wrinkled effect. Like human skin, these sculptures show signs of a life lived. “The Jewish myth of the Golem informs my practice: a being formed from raw clay, existing between creation and collapse. The Golem embodies both potential and instability, reflecting cycles of construction and destruction.” As ahuva receptively collaborated with the medium of clay, the fixing became part of the composition of the work. “Clay carries traces of labor, stress, and collapse. Seams, cracks, and exposed joins act as architectural scars and organic records of trauma, preserving memory while allowing for rebuilding.”

To be with Ben Skiba’s work is to float amidst a number of inquiries: both material and philosophical. It is to be authentically curious about the seemingly indisputable gravity of form, function, language, capacity, conventions. Are they so inflexible? To hold these inquiries alone. Or to hold them together. What else is held inside? What is outside? What does it mean to support something? Or someone? How can you be a support? Ben Skiba’s poetic work generates these sorts of provocations. His artwork chops and screws rigid conventions of craft, turns an entire history of painting inside out, all the while warmed by the kiln and a nice cup of coffee. Surfaces in his work appear wet and soft, yet are hard and weathered. They have held a lot, yet again, are not deemed precious. He routinely opens the personal space of his home to the public. He programs compelling visual art exhibitions and generously offers weekly lunches open to the public, for folks to examine their art practice over shared food and drink. Parallel to the ethos that we learn best by playing, his hospitality facilitates deeper, more meaningful investigations.

There is often a generous and community-minded spirit in clay studios– as many artists openly share materials, resources, techniques, discoveries, and accidents in the studio with each other. No doubt there will always be makers who are more proprietary about their technical processes, but this exhibition celebrates the supportive environment artists create for each other. Curated by artists, this small selection of seven artists came together through many decades of meaningful friendship and curiosity about the possibilities of this particular media.

Artspace is a nonprofit art gallery in Lake Oswego. Located at 380 A Avenue in Lake Oswego, Oregon, the gallery is open Tuesday through Friday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m and during special events. For more information about the exhibition, the artists, and curatorial statement, please visit www.artscouncillo.org.

Thank you to the artists James Alby, Lisa Conway, Marjorie Dial, Jennifer A. Mitchner, Nick Norman, Ben Killen Rosenberg, Rebecca Shala, Ben Skiba, Amy R.M. Stahl, Justin Terry and ahuva s. Zaslavsky and to the Henry Lea Hillman Jr Foundation for supporting this exhibition.