|
diversions
Grad student coils
ceramic into art
By Glenn Zucman
Special to the On-line Forty-Niner
The Design Department
Gallery is featuring a show of Melissa Maxfield's new ceramic
works this week. This culmination of her graduate studies
at Cal State Long Beach is an amazing show of Maxfield's intensely
personal and obsessive ceramic coils.
Two and a half
millennium ago, Buddha taught how a leaf knows when to flutter
off a tree. Today in this millennial moment, complexity theorists
explain how a butterfly in the rain forest affects our world.
In Maxfield's ceramic and fiber works, fine coils--each an
arcane map of her emotional passage through time and space--accrete
to form sinuous, organic forms that resonate with each other.
"The simplest
thing is a line, and a line is an extension of a dot, and
if you just begin from there and make a bunch of them, you
can make all sorts of things," said Maxfield. "I
just try to really simplify it in my head and usually the
simpler things become more complex in the end."
Every emotion in
her life translates itself viscerally into the clay, she said.
She is not one to start a piece, scrap it and start over.
She is not after the perfect piece, but the accurate piece.
Every fold and tear is, far from being a flaw, the stuff of
life that imparts its palpable, visceral presence in the clay.
"It's so fun
to make precious things and then you ruin them to make them
better again," Maxfield said in describing the process.
"It's such a torturous process, it's like abuse: 'oh
you're too beautiful I have to make you ugly, now I can make
you beautiful again.'"
In another powerful
metaphor for life, she builds up her works by coiling around
a form from the outside to the inside and all from the backside.
As she is building up the form she does not know what it is
going to look like until it is done and she turns it over.
"I just started
to really allow it to happen," Maxfield said of this
life infused creative process. "Sometimes that doesn't
happen until you let go of all those inhibitions: Let all
those feelings and sensibilities that you have inside of you
come out of your fingertips. And for me with the clay, that's
what started to happen.
"So I finally
had to accept a lot of things about myself that I liked and
I didn't like; figure out who I was in order to start making
this work, start letting it happen."
CSULB Printmaking
Chair Roxanne Sexauer, said she was intrigued about the work
at Maxfield's gallery opening Sunday.
"The way she's
using the fracturing from the firing and then building that
in as an organic part of the work, I think that's very interesting."
Sexauer said. "I like the way that I can move around
them and appreciate them not just as a flat element but also
look at the backs of the work. I think it gives them an edginess
that I like: an element of danger. There's a balance going
on that seems really tenuous."
When you enter
Maxfield's show, you are struck by the organic undulations
of the earth-colored objects. The pieces range from about
1 foot to about 12 feet and are grouped as they relate to
each other. Her process involves stages, so she works on two
or more pieces at a time and as she moves from one to the
other, they develop a dialog, a harmony.
Like a fractal
coastline, Maxfield's works reveal new curves and textures,
new moments, as the gallery visitor moves in on them. Her
forest is filled with so many trees that the gallery visitor
may feel compelled to move through the exhibition space to
find a variety of angles and distances from which to view
the work. From each vantage point, some aspect of the work
reveals itself.
The show, "Transitory
Cases" will continue through Thursday in the Design Department
Gallery.
|
