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TagsBY PAT SUMMERS
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
When Shellie Jacobson talks about "building" one of her remarkable clay vessels, she means it. To arrive at a result like "Symbols" (pictured) takes her a few hours a day for about a month.
From a series of large-scale pieces she's making now, "Symbols" was one of two stoneware art works she exhibited this spring in "East & West: Clay Works Exhibition 2010 Princeton" at the Arts Council of Princeton. Member-artists in the show represented the US, Japan and Korea, also the three countries where biennial exhibitions are held.
A native of Buffalo, NY and a longtime Skillman, NJ resident, Jacobson earned her Doctorate in Creative Arts Education from Rutgers the State University. Besides exhibiting widely, winning recognition and prizes, the 10-year member of the Princeton Artists Alliance has also taught college-level ceramics.
Building a vessel like "Symbols" (22" x 11") is a gradual process, sometimes experimental, sometimes playful, often meditative. When she begins such a work, she has no idea what the finished product will look like. She feels her way there – trying things out and drawing on all she knows about her medium."I don't make sketches," she says. "I respond to what's in front of me." That would be, to start, a mass of gray-colored clay. From it, working with rolled coils of clay, she'll painstakingly hand-build a ceramic sculpture she calls a "vessel."
How do clay coils in a ring reach a height of nearly two feet? Very gradually. Not surprisingly, Jacobson starts at the bottom and works up; the base size determines the vessel size.
To see what she's building in the round, the artist works on a board that sits on top of a revolving platform. Each day she might add two coil layers above the base of the piece. Over night, wrapped in layers of plastic, they stay moist enough for the next day's work, while also hardening enough to support the new layers that will be added above them.
So the vessel-to-be rises by about two coil layers a day. Before its "put to bed" for the night, the artist has used a variety of tools to smooth the wall's exterior. This causes the coil "lines" to disappear and merges the layers. She may press patterns into the outside wall, carve or pinch it or attach clay pieces, all in the interest of adding surface texture and marks.
Looking at "Symbols" in person while describing to a visitor how it was made, Jacobson demonstrates with small coils of clay - one ring on top of the other. She deliberately uses a shorter coil second so when she places the third coil on top of it, she'll have a window-like opening. (She could also poke through the wall to make such openings.) Later, in the finished piece, such elements will add interest to the surface of the vessel.
"You look at the whole composition," Jacobson says, as if she were talking about a 2-D art work. What she does to the surface is designed to move the viewer's eye around the piece via elements - color, bumps, holes, marks - that provide interest without stalling that movement. Looking at the profile of "Symbols," she points out "that little wart that sticks out near the bottom" with delight.
A series of small holes on the surface is there because "I just added things and I thought there should be holes here," the artist says. Even at the raw stage, she starts putting color on the clay, applying stains in large brush strokes. She may also draw and make calligraphic lines.
While building, she keeps up a running dialogue – sometimes asking the piece what it needs now, or remarking on how things are going. Though they're not utilitarian, her vessels are "primal" to her; the mark-making and texturizing she does connect to the ancient writings and graphics in her head.
The artist builds her way up until she has put enough layers together for one of the two sections of the finished piece. The sides have slowly sloped outward as she progresses so the finished vessel will be much wider at the top than at the base.
She fires the vessel's two sections at the same time – first, a couple times with the staining, and then as many glaze firings as necessary until she's satisfied with the result. "I've always paid attention to details and I confess I want people to look at them," Jacobson says. ‘The more they look at it, the more they see, so they won't grow tired of the piece."
She had made "sewing holes" in the piece during the building process so after the last firing, she can connect the vessel's two sections. (Yes, she sews them, using subtle shades of waxed linen or waxed cotton.) For stability when it's displayed, "Symbols" is bolted to the surface it will stand on, with a method that protects the ceramic work.
The "torn-edge" top of a Jacobson vessel is unique, something she invented decades ago for little porcelain bowls she was making then. "You borrow from yourself in a sense, you mine your own work," she says. "That's the continuity that keeps me going; I go back and read my own work."
That top is a risky way to finish a vessel because it could crack, Jacobson says, but she loves it. And she's philosophical: "Make another one!" There are so many stages in the process of making something from clay when ruination is possible. So she's careful to dry it slowly, fire it slowly, carry it properly and hope no one backs into it (as once happened with a piece of hers in an exhibition).
"There's a lifespan and that's just the way it is," she says.
♦♦♦
Shellie Jacobson's ceramic monoprints – 9" x 11" color prints on clay wall pieces that include narrative visual content – can be seen in the upcoming invitational exhibition at the Printmaking Council of New Jersey, Branchburg. "Myths and Marks: Archetypes throughout the Ages" includes printmaking, papermaking and book arts. It opens Saturday, July 31, 1-4 pm, and runs through Oct. 9. Details at 908-725-2110 or PrintNJ.org.
