ARLENE SHECHET: Clay is extremely elemental.
There is nothing about it that is attractive or interesting.
It’s just very, very basic.
The lack of beauty in its raw state is important to me,
because it gives me great freedom.
Because it has no character, I can make anything.
It’s just there to be invented.
So it’s called wedging.
It’s a clay term for kneading.
If you learn how to do it,
it rocks back and forth and it forms this spiral.
It’s quite cool looking.
I’m not a person dedicated to a material.
But I have dedicated the last six or seven years
to working in clay.
Clay is one of these materials that permits one to be both in control and out of control.
It’s like a real conversation with the work.
One of the great things about making art is that you get to make things
and then listen to those things and pay attention to those things.
I always wanted to be in a factory.
I would tell my parents that I wanted to be either a farmer or a factory worker.
My parents completely blew me off with that one.
Growing up in New York, you’re sort of seeing everything finished.
You don’t see anything being made.
So I wanted to know where did everything come from.
- I think I’d better cover this again.
If I add a piece of clay too soon, it collapses.
Too late, it won’t attach.
There’s a perfect moment to do everything.
And then when the moment passes it’s gone and there’s nothing to do about it.
Intellectually and maybe spiritually,
it’s an interesting thing to work with.
I build four or five things at the same time.
All of these pieces are at the beginning.
So these pieces will probably be much larger and have other elements
that I don’t know about yet.
Yesterday, I figured out that I needed to add some parts to this,
cause this is just going to be woven coils
and those just have to be added a couple of at a time.
I have these pins to remind me that these haven’t been joined,
because sometimes I could just forget.
I was thinking, I have to have a real appetite for ugly.
There are so many points where this thing is just hideous
and yet I have to believe in it.
And I have to go on with it.
But it might be something good.
Cube next.
And uh, in about fifteen minutes we’ll pour out the extra slip that you see on top.
And the plaster will allow the things to become dry clay then
when we take it out in a couple of hours.
This is a slip cast mold of a firebrick.
And you can see the mold picks up every single part of the firebrick.
Every nuance, when they’re wet like this,
I sometimes take the opportunity to, you know, do something with it.
If this thing did not have the air pressing out,
it would just collapse.
It wouldn’t hold all these forms.
Or if it was solid, you couldn’t do it at all.
This is already on a kiln shelf, right?
The really out of control part is this thing that I slave over or I play with,
will dry for several months and then it will go into a kiln of over 2,000 degrees
and that’s nuts.
You know that.....
And then all bets are off.
I come in here and pick from the tree of glaze.
I have this reference book that has photographs of every work and
then notes on what I did.
If one glaze is under another glaze or on top of it,
it will be chemically completely different and fire completely different.
We fire with a computer to a very exact degree based on what the glazes are.
This piece has gone through five or six firings.
It’ll be a couple of days of firing and then
two and a half days of cooling.
The fact that you have to make things hollow
is something I’m attracted to.
This mushy substance becomes structural.
You can push up against it,
you can create form in a way that something that’s solid could never create form.
Okay, we’re going to load this in pretty soon.
If it’s a completely solid thing then it can’t be fired.
One day I just felt how happy I was here and how I was actually getting to live my fantasy.
That being an artist, working in a studio,
I had created both a farm and a factory.
And when I thought about it,
the essence of that desire was really wanting to know how things were made.
I’m always saying yes to new situations.
If I keep creating a closed system,
then I’m not uncomfortable enough to push some boundary.
-Here we go.
I just want to be pushing boundaries and solving problems.
I was invited to Meissen.
It was very, very open-ended.
I was given a studio and I didn’t have to define a project.
I didn’t have to say what I was going to do.
And I didn’t have to design something that would be part of their production.
Ninety-nine percent of the things there are cast.
So working with molds was something
that I hadn’t incorporated into my regular clay practice.
The infrastructure of how things were made there
has edged its way into my vocabulary
in terms of the actual sculptures that I found myself making for the RISD show.
What I brought to Meissen was everything I knew.
I just wanted to let it rip.
I love every kind of industrial architecture.
Industry in general, tools.
What some person might think of as mechanized and frightening,
I think of as mechanized and fascinating.
It’s also a very particular thing at a place like
the Meissen factory which began in 1710.
The origins of the whole porcelain world are right there.
That was the first place in Europe where they figured out how to make porcelain.
Inside this place is a factory, but dedicated to the handmade,
to this vigilant craftsmanship that in many ways I am the antithesis of.
Borrowing from their insane need for perfection, empowered my desire for imperfection.
I walked around the factory endlessly and I realized
that the thing I really loved were the molds.
The mold forms were way closer to my aesthetic than
the things that were coming out of those molds
that were the Meissen traditional objects.
I ended up making a proposal that I would make molds of their molds
and cast in porcelain slip my molds creating porcelain versions of their industrial objects.
When I cast in their molds,
I left all of the seams and all of the little signs and symbols that
indicated how to put the piece together and would never been seen outside of the factory.
I cast in the signatures as sort of a celebration of the worker.
The workers, when they saw them, they would just laugh.
I was taking bits and pieces of everything that was true to Meissen,
historically and everything that was true to me as a contemporary artist
working in an 18th Century factory and try to put it together.
ANDREW MOLLEUR: This is the largest thing up here too.
ARLENE SHECHET: Yeah, right, right in here.
I think really close in there is great.
I really like that.
It’s like coming from inside.
Okay, well undoubtedly we will fire it again.
But I might start, start to work with it.
I’m going to turn this around.
We needed to make scale versions of each sculpture for the gallery.
Down here, I can very roughly approximate the way I might see things as I enter the gallery.
I don’t want everything at the same height.
I don’t want too many things with metal over there,
too many things with concrete over here.
So I’m balancing all of those concerns very, very intentionally.
The complete piece is not just the ceramic.
The complete piece is something that allows the ceramic
to live in the world at the height I want,
in the shape I want, and in the material combination that I want.
And in the color I want.
What is referred to as the pedestal,
I sometimes call the architecture of the piece.
I have a real appreciation for how complex it is
to make something that is compelling
and that changes with every view.
That is an old-fashioned sculptural concern that I love
and that I believe comes back to that thing of
people walking around the pieces in the gallery.
Sculpture creates movement.
I did in my early teaching improvisational dance
with the students because I think it’s the same thing.
Clay is a great three-dimensional drawing material.
It leaves a record in the same way that a drawing leaves a very direct record of the
artist’s hand.
The installation is the whole thing and that’s a very big idea.
I think actually I’m an installation artist who makes objects.
I want to make something more than an idea.
I don’t want anybody to be able to describe the pieces too easily.
I want to make things that are more open-ended than that.
I want to make physical comedy and intellectual humor
that has a kind of visceral reaction
that ends up by creating some sort of complex feeling.
So that the reaction isn’t, I understand this,
the reaction is what is this and why?