Judges had a little trouble coming up with a word to describe the work of Stephanie Lanter — which is exactly what made it special.
“Why won’t you,” won Best of Show at the biannual Kirkland Arts Center exhibition centered around pushing the limits of ceramics: Clay? VI.
Doug Jeck went with “absorbent.” Jame Walker leaned toward, “a little bit on the obsessive side.”
Neither could settle on something that really fit.
Both are professors at the University of Washington’s 3D4M — formerly Ceramics — department. Along with fellow professor Michael Swaine, the two juried over 100 pieces for the show and selected 19 artists.
Jeck and Walker have been judging pieces since the exhibition’s inception in 2006, and played a role in the out-of-the-ordinary name.
“We were interested in doing it, but we wanted to consider a broader range of what ceramics was capable of instead of what a lot of juried exhibitions were like at the time,” Jeck said. “The question mark was, whatever you thought of clay, we wanted you to reconsider.”
The exhibition, which opened June 17 and runs until Sept. 10, includes a wide variety of artwork. One collection has tiny acorns, spools of thread, a cactus and a candle, all made of clay. A small work in the back is held together entirely by friction and gravity, and the entryway is dominated by a large piece featuring a woman pulling against two ropes with her eyes shut — “Blind Strife of the Entwined.”
One of the smallest pieces is a simple clay sphere which the artist requested be placed on the floor in an inconspicuous corner. Four copies of a self-published, unauthorized transcription of a lecture on graffiti are pinned between the sphere and the wall.
The winning piece is at the center of the upstairs room, and fits into Lanter’s resume. “Why won’t you” is from the “See Threads/Tangles & Piles” collection, and is intentionally unkempt. Meant to illustrate what happens when personal connections get messy, the piece looks like a cross-section of a sand dollar — or a sheep drawn by a sleepy toddler — or a very oddly-shaped wind chime.
The second-place piece, while entirely different in composition with the first, also has depth. Created by Amy Simons, “Traverse” appears at first as a crudely-made clay pot with a ring of gold around the top.
Upon further inspection, and a look inside the piece, the clay fades into darkness — a chasm, with the gold traversing its edge. Jeck and Walker were drawn to the economy and simplicity. Instead of glaze, the artist used differing colors of clay to create the fade effect.
As Clay? is celebrating a 10-year anniversary, Kirkland Art Center will be putting on three months of clay-centric workshops, programs and events, including the Community Bead Project and Claygraphy, a creative writing workshop in which inspiration comes from sculpture.
Summer of Clay, which explores the medium from the basics to the wild and wacky, seems aligned with the ideal behind Clay?’s initial offering.
“We’re interested in seeing something we haven’t seen that much of before; things that are leading the field somewhere else or suggesting where it might go,” Jeck said. “By selecting the work, we’re maybe encouraging some people to keep going that way.”
