The Wood-Fired Kiln: A Catalyst for Collaboration

Exhibit Details

November 5, 2016 - March 5, 2017
Reception: November 4, 2016, 5:30 - 7:00 PM
Eldredge, Spratlen, and Armstrong Galleries

Firing with wood has re-emerged as an aesthetic and pedagogy of tremendous importance in ceramics, its influence widening well past the immediate sphere of the skilled artists for whom it is central. The discipline now holds extended influence over a wide variety of artists who occasionally approach the discipline to fulfill their disparate creative aims. As wood-firing’s extended family, these “outsiders” have formed their sensibilities external to the tradition’s distinctive vocabulary and as such approach the process from unusual and sometimes productively naïve viewpoints.

This exhibit will include the work of seven well-known local, regional, national and international ceramicists: Nina Hole, Priscilla Mouritzen, Rick Hirsch, Ken Baskin, Scott Meyer, Keith Ekstam and Jeff Johnston. The exhibit will focus specifically on work that has been created using a wood-fire kiln and will investigate the character and dynamic of the collaborations that have resulted from this very communal and social process.