Children of the Clay
Just when I was complaining about the dearth of conceptual ceramics lately (last week’s “Pot Heads”), I ran across Lisa Marie Barber’s exhibition at the Leedy-Voulkos Art Center. Barber, an assistant professor of art at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside in Kenosha, works with ceramics as installation art.
Airplanes and Buildings incorporates quilts and a couple of free-standing ceramic sculptures. The exhibition is ambitious and earnest — and fractured and uneven. Though they’re well-crafted, the quilts feel a bit too childish, even for an exhibition that partly trades on childhood and a childlike execution of the clay. But these references frame larger ideas about urban life and the individual’s relationship to the city. The quilts anchor the exhibition with too gentle a framework, softening the rough edge of the installation works.
Barber’s largest sculptures are of children, though abstracted and minimally presented. She glazes surfaces with painterly passages so that the bodies act as canvases. “Horse Girl” is the exhibition’s most intriguing work: about 4 feet tall, an odd girl with protuberances coming out of her skirt/body and out of her head and houses painted on her cheek, lending her an alien quality. Like the other sculptures of children in this exhibition, “Horse Girl” is less a child than a metaphorical vehicle. But for what?
Barber has a romantic and fictional view of children. “Chosen for their purity of being, I use children as models of simplistic, unalienated living,” she writes on her Web site. “To me, they represent a connection to the world that can be simultaneously awkward and full of possibility.” Children are indeed awkward and full of possibility, but they are not empty vessels waiting to be filled with external ideas. They have their own genetic codes and biological imperatives. Barber’s “children” are too abstract to really telegraph her idealistic notions of youth.
“Flyers” is one of two ceramic installations, both of which are designed to suggest the density of urban living. Here Barber extends the work to the wall, on which she has painted a blue background with a chalked-on, childlike cityscape. Two small figures, a boy and a girl, stand on a pile of ceramics — platforms, stars and other crudely done objects such as highways, roads and a crazy urban landscape. It’s a jumbled-up and scattered-looking installation that still manages to hold itself together.
Similarly, “Little City” is an excited accumulation of objects — cartoony flowers, cars, streets and lumpy things. A figure of a small girl stands trapped in the center of this cacophony. In her artist’s statement, Barber says she wants to “describe life” as “positive, elusive and rich with sentiment and possibility.” In conveying her sincere and romantic notions of the world, she hits her mark: The installations are exuberant and lively. Somewhat conversely, her treatment of the human form as both representational and a site of conceptual exploration suggests that her work could be more ambitious and more expansive. Perhaps by leaving out the decorative quilts, Barber could let her installation and sculptures evolve into a more focused and critical visual conversation about the body’s relationship to its busy and often manic surroundings.
