Fuller Craft Museum, New England’s home for contemporary craft presents Photo Clay: In the Picture With Warren Mather, an exhibition of the artist’s work from the last decade, with an emphasis on the development and diversity of his exploration of visual perception over the last five years. The exhibition runs through Jan. 23, 2011.
For 30 years artist Warren Mather has explored and tested the expressive and technical boundaries of clay. In his recent work, Mather has developed and refined his method for transferring film, photography, and computer-generated images onto a clay body in glaze by use of silkscreen printing. The virtuosity of Mather’s technique allows for an astonishing level of detail. Yet far from simply an expression of photorealism in ceramics, Mather’s true talent is in using the two dimensional image to inform and reflect our own visual experience. His panoramic images are fired to long panels or round discs of clay, capturing the physical gesture of a turned head of a shifted glance.
With a background in anthropology, Mather’s approach to the image recorded in his ceramics is one of culturally informed subjectivity. “In my mind the process of taking a picture is like sensing and recording an event by physically pressing clay against and around it… All seeing is subjective. We don’t see in rectangles. Clay offers a hard copy of my vision.”
Mather is the originator of sodium carbonate spray as a substitute for salt glaze firing. Recent work is of imagery from video stills and digital photographs fired in ceramic glaze on tile murals and plates. Exhibitions include; Water Lines,” Lacoste Gallery, Concord, Mass. (10); “International Printmaking Symposium Exhibition,” Jingdezhen, China (2009), “Urban Perspectives,” Judy Ann Goldman Fine Art, Boston; Texting, Print and Clay,” Pewabic Pottery, Detroit, Mich. (08); “Landscape Shapes.” Lacoste Gallery, Concord, Mass, (07); SOFA New York, (06); Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, N.H.; (04); Judy Ann Goldman Fine Art, Boston; Fuller Museum of Art, Brockton; (03); World Architectural Ceramics Exhibition, Foshan, China; Slater Museum, Norwich, Conn.; (02); Blue Spiral 1, Asheville, N.C. (01); Galerie Caroline Corre, Paris, France (89); and Museum Bellerive, Zurich, Switzerland (87). His public art includes photo-clay installations for Fidelity Investments, Boston; and Cambridge Savings Bank, and in collaboration with Nancy Selvage – ceramic murals for the National Park Service, Grand Canyon; Keene State College, Keene, N.H.; and the State Zoo of North Carolina. He has been an Artist in Residence in Sanbao, China: Kecskemet, Hungary and Jurmala, Latvia.
Mather currently serves on the faculty of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and lives in Weston, Mass.
Image: Warren Mather. Downtown Crossing, 2006. Glazed ceramic.
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