Cataract Culvert, 2020, coiled & wood-fired stoneware with slip, mishima, & glaze, each group of five parts measures 70” x 26” x 14”
Cataract Culvert encapsulates my sense of fluidity & constraint in a deluge. Previously I sought to capture similar themes of passage, escape, evacuation, & obstruction in Endless Plumb (Plugged) (2014) & The Quick & the Dead (2018). Cataract Culvert is ten modules arranged in two segments, one vertical, one horizontal. Each segment creates the space of an implied human body, showing the semi-permeable isolation of the body, like an anchorite at attention or at rest or both. Perforations in the art of Renata Francescon, Lawson Oyekan, Bror Utter, & Hsu Yunghsu led me here as did the fluidity & constraint of wood firing. The flow of wood ash in the wood firing provides the varied surfaces, stony or watery. The drawings represent the “three friends of winter” motif—pine, plum, & bamboo, a symbol of grace under pressure. Pictured with the scholar’s rock, together they render resilience, resistance, & resourcefulness of intellect in response to the world’s brute forces. “Threshold”, the poem by Maggie Smith, is a principal inspiration of Cataract Culvert.
“Threshold”
You want a door you can be
on both sides of at once.
You want to be
on both sides of here
and there, now and then,
imagine yourself passing from
and into. Passing through
doorway after
doorway after doorway.
together and—(what
did we call the life
we would wish back?
The old life? The before?)
alone. But any open
space may be
a threshold, an arch
of entering and leaving.
Crossing a field, wading
through nothing
but timothy grass,
imagine yourself passing from
and into. Passing through
doorway after
doorway after doorway.
-Maggie Smith