Thursday,
July 05, 2007
Sexy Ceramics
Evocations
of a yonic imperative at Westport Arts Center
Solos
Show
Through July 15 at Westport Arts Center,
51 Riverside Ave., Westport, (203) 226-1806, www.westportartscenter.org
Esme is aloof but sexy; Jezabelle is full of grief;
Thalia is into bondage, for sure; the well-bred Countessa is insouciant yet
tightly wound; and Anais is a big-bossomed seductress who doesn't mind a little
rough trade.
"Thalia" is actually a pitcher (as in
vessel, not baseball), a white porcelain sculpture of a headless female form on
her knees and holding her ankles from behind in a sort of advanced yoga pose.
She's one of 10 beauties made by Westport ceramic artist Jocelyn Braxton
Armstrong, whose work was chosen to appear in Westport Arts Center's Solos Show, a juried exhibition of members'
work.
The show also features the work of four other member
artists—two photographers, a printmaker and a mixed-media painter—but
Armstrong's work is so unusual and compelling, it alone is reason enough to
attend the exhibition, which opened last Friday.
Armstrong has a fine-arts degree from Maryland
Institute College of Art, but she made a living as a fashion photographer and
stylist for Harper's
Bazaar magazine
until she quit in 2001 to raise her kids. It was then she dove back into making
ceramic sculptures with a disciplined passion. (She works on multiple pieces
while her children are at school and after they've gone to bed.)
A sense of high style pervades the work, as
Armstrong beautifully captures gesture, emotion and movement in her feminine
forms, which are as much inspired by the drawings of Henri Matisse as they are
by the slouching, seductive poses of today's supermodels.
More than likely it was her deconstructionist
approach and the technique she perfected that gives her work its unique,
stitched together look that garnered her the attention in last month's issue of
Ceramics
Monthly, which
named Armstrong an emerging artist in the field of ceramics.
Armstrong begins by throwing white porcelain into a
predetermined abstract shape. She then deconstructs that shape, cutting it into
pieces, and reassembles it the way a dressmaker would, scoring the pieces and
stitching them back together, this time
using black slurry. It's the black
slip that gives the work its distinct, delicately sewn appearance.
The black lines can be interpreted many ways—as
strands of barbed wire, suture marks or the hatch-mark stitching on a beloved
stuffed animal.
My favorite piece, "Missing Them," is a
twisting female shape with a big, egg-shaped concavity where the figure's belly
might be. Is this an expression of barrenness, or a mother suffering from empty
nest syndrome? For Armstrong, probably neither. But the beauty of her work, as
it is with
most good art, is the viewer is coerced into the creative process
and given license to imagine.
lgengo@fairfieldweekly.com
