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Quiet.
As in any minimalist exhibition, the works themselves seem to call for
quiet. A small white ceramic object, dimpled by the mark of fingers,
dappled with glaze. Light hits rust red that deepens almost to black
purple. A smooth glazing trails off to a matte, pock-marked gray. The
eye follows the circle, glides down the cylinder, sees the way colors
darken inside the shadowed interior of a bowl.
Phil Sims, an artist well known for his work as painter in the Radical
and Concrete traditions, brings to this exhibition a body of work which
distills the distinctions between function and aesthetic, material and
form, color and light, intention and chance, elemental and transcendent.
With Tea Bowls Sims brings together a collection of his high-fired,
wood-fired ceramic sculptures. These pieces are, indeed, shaped clay tea
bowls in the Japanese tradition -- larger than a cup, smaller than a
soup bowl, they are meant to be held snugly between two hands. This link
to the roots of this ceramic tradition are born out in that Sims uses a
traditional Anagama (an ancient type of Japanese wood-fired kiln) to
make his pieces.
The process by which these pieces are made adds a level of complexity to
their seeming quiet, for they are born out of intense physical effort
and a raging inferno. Sims chooses unrefined clays filled with gravel,
sand, and grit, bordering on impossible to throw on a wheel. He adds to
the physical difficulty of his art-making process by limiting himself to
creating their basic form in three moves. Rough, textural clay is molded
into these fine bowl forms by the deft movement of a highly skilled
hand.
The firing process is even more strenuous. The wood-burning kiln is
fired to above 2200 degrees Fahrenheit and in the case of Sims' work,
which he likes to fire at higher-than-normal temperatures, above 2400
degrees. At these temperatures the blaze inside the kiln melts the wood
ash, transforming it into a natural glaze that attaches to the bowls in
unique, random, and surprising ways. The whole process takes 5-6 days of
24 hour care, as wood must be added every ten minutes. In the end an
artist is lucky to have 10% of his pieces survive the transformation
from clay to ceramic. But these pieces will be well worth the effort. As
Sims says, "The kiln itself is like a living breathing beast, eating
wood, expelling smoke and flame, and carrying in its belly the treasure
you are so expectant about. Each kiln is fired with such hope and
expectation and a single gem is worth the effort, for in the flame and
ash there exists such possibility that even with all the disappointment,
and believe me there is much disappointment, you are eager to try
again."
These "gems" from out of the fire are elegant, quiet, tea bowls,
redolent not only with their origins in the fire but with the echoes of
a centuries-old cultural tradition of use in the highly aesthetic
Japanese Tea Ceremony. However, Sims' pieces are not created and
displayed as functional objects. Taking the Concrete tradition of art to
its extension, Sims dislocates and recontextualizes the tea bowls as
objects of art, creating a fissure of expectation in the viewer that
changes something as humble as a tea bowl into a work of art, changing
the way the viewer will see both the ceramic piece before her, and the
functional objects of everyday life.
And this state of dislocation is exactly where the viewer is able to
see. Preconceptions gone, there is an opportunity for the viewer to
really look at these pieces and see them clearly. The rich, material
forms of the clay: rippled, smooth, rough, pock-marked. The interplay of
surface, light, and color: the transparent glazes, some quite glossy and
others matte, the deep earthy tones of the reds, blues, grays, browns.
Here in this intimate relationship between viewer and object is the
quintessential act of art. The place where contradictions can come
together.
Perhaps, at its best, all art brings together the strands of disparate
webs of thought and activity into one harmonious, still point of
expression. Contradictions are brought into accord, elements are
balanced. Sims' tea bowls succeed in just this way: The pocked and
bubbled, the twisted and strained, rough and smooth, the fluid and
luminous, smooth and radiant are able to reside together, caught in time
by the work of a pair of hands. |