CERAMICS COMMENCEMENT EXHIBITION

2012

CERAMICS COMMENCEMENT EXHIBITION

2012

Elbow to elbow, through endless critiques, perceived failures and

successes, a voice emerges. A simple hope for a teacher in the studio

(but one that is trickier than you might think) is to always manage to

challenge, while in many ways trying to simultaneously stay out of the

way. It is the regular engagement with this push and pull that is learning

and teaching. As students take full advantage of the social and artistic

laboratory of education they learn how curiosity, discipline and criticality

combine. Through this process students become teachers as well. They

collaborate, within the context of the studio environment and within the

context of their communities.

These five artists have finished negotiating one of the first bumps in the

anything but straight road that is the journey of being an artist. Not a

“bump” as an impediment, but “bump” in the moment that the falling

child is caught in the act of learning. This catalogue is, in a sense, a

small souvenir of the residue of four years of falling; the more falling, the

better.

and one last directive… Make good art / Art!!

The writer Polly Berrien Berends noted that:

“The child does not begin to fall until she becomes seriously interested in walking, until she actually begins learning. Falling is thus more an indication of learning than a sign of failure.”

Art making is a lot like learning to walk. It is a trek into hitherto

uncharted territory, over unfamiliar and often illogically precarious

terrain. For those who make (as distinct from those who simply

conceptualize) there is also an enormous learning curve involving fine

motor skills, appropriate (or wonderfully inappropriate but nevertheless

effective) tool usage and language. There is the history of art/Art to

consider as well; the history of materials, of ideas, of ways of seeing

interwoven with the larger history of the problematic species Homo

sapiens.

A culture is formed around these issues, a community formed around

a willingness to engage in these complicated questions of making.

Ceramics as a field is both an axis and a magnet. The work rotates

around its traditions and new directions and the impulses of forming

both literal and metaphoric. A community is formed partially out of this

attraction and the collaboration necessary to make it all work. It is in this

place of trust in oneself and those around you that one’s best work can

be made.

It has been a pleasure,

David S. East

Chair: Ceramics Department

Maryland Institute College of Art

Adelaide Paul

Faculty: Ceramics Department

Maryland Institute College of Art

Focus and Riff: The MICA Senior Ceramics Exhibition

Commencement and Clay. Beginnings in ceramics. What an amazing

time to be entering a field that is so rich with possibilities, that the

most difficult part about it for these graduates may be deciding how

to focus their work and forge ahead. But focus is essential, and the

launch into continued studio practice requires improvisation, play

and exploration - what jazz musicians call “riff”.

Throughout the exhibition, in the work of these five artists, both

focus and riff are evident. Caitlin Dean’s focus, for me, is her

almost timelessly elegant use of a material, which on its own has

little elegance. Who could imagine that a series of glass containers

of liquid, each containing a lump of raw, unfired clay slowly

disintegrating into the water, could represent at once landscape,

impermanence, the existential nature of humanity, and more. The

riff is a powerful, simple one that is echoed visually by some of her

more static wall works. The possibilities are endless. Let the play

continue.

Play, and the notion of exuberance are so evident in Rafael Corzo’s

work that I was happy to see it displayed outdoors in the courtyard. I

could both view it at a distance, and still touch it and see its colorful

iconography and surface detail up close. Mass, form, volume and

visual (and actual) weight are among the more formal elements of

sculpture that an artist must consider, and Corzo certainly takes all

kinds of liberties with that formality. He literally plays with balance;

he riffs on material, color, and decoration.

His focus is cultural, and it reads as an authentic and specific

homage to Mexican folk art without appropriating it. Lush and

overblown, this work is a very BIG conversation for Corzo. It has

heart, love, passion and boundless energy and LOTS of clay in it.

As a counterpoint to Corzo’s enthusiastic, material-centered work,

Caitlin Kambic makes and assembles tightly rendered, design-based

constructions of fiber and clay. The material is subservient to her

ideas of balance and spatial organization; the pieces are weblike and

want to hold time, light, air, and thought. Like others in this group

of BFA graduates, Kambic demonstrates mastery of her material,

and she has not made it a facile or easy mastery. Technically, she is

able to carry off the making in service to the concept. The pieces on

view convey mystery and dilemma. They are fragile – the tracery of

ceramic line, the suspension of ceramic elements on fiber –but the

idea is strong. Her riff and her focus play a duet, and the resultant

melody is haunting. This is work that begs the question not only of

“how”, but also of “why.”

Material continues to be explored, but with an understanding of

context for the work of Nellie Sorenson, exhibited alone in the

Gateway Building. Sorenson’s work, like Corzos’, needs a big

environment to demonstrate what it wants to do. Porcelain, that

most precious and responsive of clays, is folded and manipulated

and floats through a field of aquamarine.

Exploiting the whiteness, plasticity and preciousness of porcelain

through its nearly impossible thinness on the field of pale turquoise

– and having it “writ large” is evocative of Caribbean marine plant

life, tissue paper dropped into a pond, or airborne ash. Suggestion,

movement and placement are Sorenson’s focus while she riffs on the

material –scrunching, pinching, letting it fall, moving it around and

freezing it onto its background.

Frozen in place while narrating relationships is how I view the

assembled still-life vignettes of Emery Wach. Wach’s construction of

simple slab-built vessels, juxtaposed with glass bottles and objects

is less about clay and glass than it is about one being’s proximity to

another. Colors, shapes and sizes are carefully positioned. What can

stand alone? What is part of a group? Can clay and glass translate

to a social condition? Can inanimate containers imitate life? Is

Wach’s work about who is accepted and who fits in, versus who is in

opposition? Wach’s focus is in placement of containers, rather than

the containers themselves. Is this metaphor or is the metaphor in

the eyes and mind of the viewer?

All of the works of these recent ceramics graduates demonstrate

competencies that will enable each of them to “riff while artmaking”

and to carry that making on into the future. There is the obvious

control of clay, ceramic materials and technical processes. There is

a remarkable originality and freshness of concept in each person’s

work, and

enough content to pique the curiosity of the viewer. I don’t see

much borrowing from each other, either technically or conceptually,

an admirable quality in work from a shared academic studio

environment. But what is most evident to me is the celebration and

resolution that the exhibition as a whole embodies. These qualities

reflect observation, investigation, critical thinking, and a measure of

focus, all adding up to potential.

It was a joy to view this work and to be asked to write about it. I

thank professor David East and his colleagues at Maryland Institute

College of Art for teaching well; and I thank the student committee

for inviting me to provide this catalog essay. Above all, I express

appreciation to the five BFA graduates who chose clay for serious

pursuit in their academic careers. The broader field of ceramics

welcomes you with joyful anticipation.

Deborah BedwellFounding Director, Baltimore Clayworks

President–elect, National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts

(NCECA)

RAFAEL CORZO • 11

CAITLIN DEANE • 13

JESSICA HANS • 15

CAITLIN KAMBIC • 17

ELEANOR ANNE SORENSON • 18

EMERY WACH • 21

FEATURED ARTISTS

RAFAEL CORZO

Clay is earth, earth is nature, and nature in my hands is art. Art is

energy, an inherent force in my blood, the strength of my culture,

relentlessly working with the desire to express, give, and share the

adventure of creation. In consciousness and materiality where all

possibilities already exist, clay is visceral audacity, innocent and

savage in conception and evolution. There in every moment where

you are, there will always be a place for continuity. Ceramics is a

rational structure in a naughty skin. In an act of love, the grotesque

is a sensibility anew, a synergy between the tumultuous and the

well-behaved. Opened areas allow you to enter the intimate space

where process and theory are captured and give birth to eclectic

forms escaping gravity, expressing motion. Ceramics is aspiration

and wild euphoria where harmony and rhythm can never have

enough embellishments. And I am, seduced by density in ecstasy

- a constellation of colors in a unifying palette celebrating life.

In a constant state of creation and in a virtuous cycle, I dream of

universality transcending ages. These are the genuine feelings and

expansive energy vibrating inside the artist, a true essence. It is the

frenzied pursuit of a vision, estoy aquí con fuerza. It is not a fantasy, I

give myself with devotion looking for all beauty: compressed, unreal,

ideal, ethereal. With this premise in the heart, and clarity in my

mind, art will always be. Like birds looking for the stars on a journey

so far the distance, I keep hope for and faith in a bright tomorrow: so

in love with art, so in love with life, creating destiny.

IMG. 1

IMG. 1, 2, 3 — Tip’ ix k’áak’ [ 11’ X 11’ X 11’ - Ceramics - 2012 ]

RAFAEL CORZO • 11IMG. 3

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CAITLIN DEANE

With the changing state of the world, I feel a greater necessity

to remember and express how we are all connected, how we are

all reliant on the same resources. Themes of the body as one’s

own home are discussed through the use of adobe and local clay

deposits in multiple forms within my sculptures and installations.

Nestled beneath our feet, clay hides within a history underground.

Clay inherently shows the mark of its maker, and to unveil such a

material through the act of digging is to reveal more than a lifetime

of the earth as maker. I seek to resurrect an archaic reverence

towards local and natural materials through the use of adobe and

local clay deposits within my work. By foraging local clay I embrace

self-sufficiency towards process and product. This material

continually teaches me a new language of working, whereas

industrially produced clays lack location and harness conventional

movements. My processes utilize the history of clay and its uses, but

the resultant objects ask questions of the allocation of value within

contemporary society.

For conceptual and aesthetic inspiration, I’ve turned to historical

uses of unfired clay in architecture, mud wasp nests, land art,

and my strong background in drawing and painting. Since humans

discovered and foraged clay to fire and make pottery, different types

of clay have been used in ceramic work within different cultures.

Clay, one of the earth’s most primal elements, has been used as a

building material dating back to aboriginal societies.

Adobe has architectural connotations as a medium commonly

used for building bricks and slabs for large houses predominantly

in the American Southwest and South America because of its

great thermal mass. Although adobe has a very large historical

influence, it possesses the potential to discuss contemporary issues

surrounding environmental consciousness.

IMG. 1

A ceramic object never directly reveals the process it has gone

through, but rather the current state or finished product. Most

surface processes involved happen inside a kiln or outside in various

types of firings. I let nature reclaim its material in many of my time-

based pieces, as clay’s fragility and ephemerality has taught me to

accept impermanence and recognize change. In a perpetual state

of succession, I methodically recycle older pieces to create new

work. By using this material in multiple conditions, raw, wet, slip,

bone dry, bisqued, and fired, I can rejoice in clay’s transformative

properties to mimic the body’s own cyclical stages. Often times, only

the maker witnesses clay’s multiple states. My work engages with

the viewer, to let him or her witness these moments of change and

time happening, rather than be reflecting on time already passed.

According to Merriam-Webster dictionary, clay is defined as “earth,

especially regarded as the material from which the human body was

formed…the human body, esp. as distinguished from the spirit or

soul; the flesh.” The human body, the clay body, and the earth are

one as they encompass birth, growth, transformation, death, and

rebirth.

IMG. 1 — Viewlogy [ Viewlogy, Local Maryland Clay, rainwater, glass, steel - 60” x 9” x 9” - 2012 ]

IMG. 2 — Landscape II [ Local Maryland clay, wood, oil paint - 20” x 20” x 3” - 2012 ]

IMG. 3 — With Legs In [ Local Maryland Clay, straw, sawdust, sand, acrylic - 32” x 44” x 13” - 2012 ]

CAITLIN DEANE • 13

IMG. 2

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JESSICA HANS

Jessica Hans’ current work stems from an attraction to patterns and

textures occurring in specific plant species, rocks, and minerals.

She aims to translate these various motifs found in nature onto the

surfaces of her quasi-functional ceramic pieces. The large-scale

sculptural forms are abstractions of Puya raimondii and the Titan

arum, two extremely large and rare flowering plants.

Jessica received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Maryland Institute

College of Art in 2012 and currently lives in Baltimore, Maryland.

IMG. 1

IMG. 1 — Aquatic Stump Bucket [ Glazed Ceramic - 5” x 6” x 4” - 2011 ]

IMG. 2 — Trio [ Glazed Ceramic - Dimensions vary - 2011 ]

IMG. 3 — Cucumber Vase [ Glazed Ceramic - 4” x 4.5” x 10” - 2011 ]

JESSICA HANS • 15

IMG. 2

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CAITLIN KAMBIC

A tightrope walker crosses a line; the viewer holds their breath until safety is reached

As an artist, I am interested in both physical and psychological

balancing acts of the body in space. The walker is a skilled

craftsman; one who would only trusts the true risk of their practice

in their feet, as a creator would their hands. This delicate moment

between grace and peril, success and failure, is the birthplace of

longing.

Through working with ceramics I explored the notion of structures,

complex systems that are made of many parts. I believe these

systems exist in many places, from city architecture to social

systems and personal emotions. There is strength as well as frailty

in being dependent upon another force. Working in this way has

allowed me to push the clay to a point of near weightless fragility.

These complex systems reflect the heart of our past. They exist in

myths of ancient heroes, and imagery of human’s early innovations.

The first flying machines evoke wonder, just as antique tools bring

us back to a slower time. Materials with a history often help us

remember the past, by looking from the present we able to see how

challenges became possibilities.

IMG. 1

IMG. 2

Through confronting limitations, humans push the mundane in

order to bring about new possibilities that alter life. These exercises

in challenging impossible tasks are the seeds of a new kind of

creative thinking. We can gain new views of the world that allow us

to learn even more about our environment, and ourselves. Through

a poetic image or series of objects, I tell the story of those who push

boundaries and their environments. The technical challenges I

create in my studio practice and the imagery of the resulting work

are metaphors for the challenges we face in our day-to-day lives that

we all must overcome.

IMG. 1, 2, 3 — Circumvent [ ceramic, wood, mylar - 12’x 6’x 6’ - 2012 ]

CAITLIN KAMBIC • 17

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ELEANOR ANNE SORENSON

Like a child porcelain is constantly testing me, asking and

demanding my attention. Like a lover it guides my hands with blind

persuasion. In the end I realize that I am building portraits of myself,

described by the turmoil and mock precision reflected on the

vessel’s surface. I have an intrinsic connection with clay.

There is inherent frustration and satisfaction that comes from

creating with the white silky material. The method I use puts me

in a position to have a direct link with the art during each step of

its existence. Though I have some union with clay, still the only

thing that I have control over is myself. The substance directs the

trajectory of the vessel shape, but I dictate my reactions.

I intuitively chose to work with porcelain because it is the one

material that forces me to compromise the most. I cannot dominate

its substance but we are both reliant on each other to create

artwork. Porcelain cannot become something other than porcelain

unless I introduce it to form. Likewise my emotion stays an abstract

idea unless I can house it in my vessels through the strain and

turmoil that comes from working with something so malleable.

I am driven to create by the feeling of family, which is vital to my very

being. It is the intimacy between beings that draws them together

through success and failure that motivates my creations. It is a

method that I share with every artist, to love what you do, to do it

because you need to. But it is my borderline incestuous union that I

have with my work that sets it apart. My vessels are individuals, my

family, and reflections of what supports me.

IMG. 1

IMG. 1 — Paul [ Porcelain - 2012 ]

IMG. 2 — All My Children ( detail ) [ Porcelain - 2012 ]

IMG. 3 — Mitchell [ Porcelain - 2012 ]

ELEANOR ANNE SORENSON • 19

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EMERY WACH

The definition of an artist as one who draws, paints or sculpts has

trickled down into its many visual subdivisions and across the

humanities; now three-dimensional artists tend to identify instead

with the overarching but simplified noun of Maker. We Makers have

to address in ourselves that – as habitual practitioners of creative

production – we are the new mini factories of stuff. Our ‘craft’ no

longer necessarily denotes function and usefulness – sometimes

the exact opposite. When we have an irrepressible idea or theory, we

scratch our itch with innumerous objects until there’s a new itch to

scratch.

My artistic methods span mediums commonly outside of western tradition,

but always very consciously. When I approach a new project I consider

the wisdom of the Naval Officer, Grace Hopper: ask forgiveness rather

than permission – I like to ensure there will be nothing to forgive by being

confident first in my research. I can assume that she meant to trust her

instincts to follow the best course of action, and explain why later – to

not disregard intuition. I inherit my role as a Maker the same way – by

establishing the parameters of my projects with conscientiousness for

my environment and respect for others, I give myself room to experiment

creatively within boundaries.

IMG. 1

IMG. 1 — Reduction Cylinders [ Porcelain with mason stain - 2012 ]

IMG. 2, 3 — Thesis Show: After Party [ Found glass bottles; fused; luster - 2012 ]

As a ceramic and glass artist it’s often especially hard to justify to

myself the essential techniques of my medium without wondering

what missing link makes its culturally accessible for me to use

porcelain, or why it’s necessary to keep a glass furnace on at

temperature for months on end. To inherit the craft comes with

the obligations – they can be motivating, like filling an entire kiln to

get an even temperature and limit your number of firings; but the

most efficient process is still working in a communal studio sharing

natural resources.

This current body of work is an attempt to begin combining all

these things cohesively without being obtuse about my sustainable

methods.

Through using the mason stains to alter the porcelain I was ale to

create a completely different surface without overworking it – firing

a Cone 10 reduction kiln can take over a day; I eliminated the need

for a glaze by incorporating the color into the clay body. Similarly,

instead of requiring an entire furnace of molten glass, I decided to

use manufactured glass bottles and alter them with cold working

methods.

By using a tile saw to cut the bottles, or a very low kiln setting to melt

them, I used the pre-existing ergonomical bottle measurements to

redesign through subtraction. In my future work I hope to bring what

I’ve learned through these semesters further – applying the theories

of my methods into more articulated craft processes.

EMERY WACH • 21IMG. 3

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For more information on featured artists and programs of study please visit the Ceramics home page at:http://www.mica.edu/ceramics

Founded in 1826, Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) is the oldest continuously degree-

granting college of art and design in the nation. The College enrolls more than 2,000

undergraduate, graduate, and continuing studies students from 46 states and 53 countries

in fine arts, design, electronic media, art education, liberal arts and professional studies

degree and non-credit programs. Redefining art and design education, MICA is pioneering

interdisciplinary approaches to innovation, research, and community and social engagement.

Alumni and programming reach around the globe, even as MICA remains a cultural cornerstone

in the Baltimore/Washington region, hosting hundreds of exhibitions and events annually by

students, faculty, and other established artists.

This publication was made possible by the MICA Alumni Association.

CERAMICS DEPARTMENTMaryland Institute College of Art

1300 Mount Royal Ave.Baltimore, MD 21217Office: 410-225-2251

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