Mad River Valley Arts looked up with last year’s spring and summer exhibitions, “RISE” and “ALOFT.” This year the Waitsfield gallery is getting grounded with “Earthen,” a showcase of ceramics by some 20 artists from Vermont and around the country.
Executive director Sam Talbot-Kelly, who curated the show, was inspired by the material itself — arguably the oldest and literally the most basic medium for art making.
“When you’re working in clay, you’ve got earth in your hand,” she said on a tour of the exhibition.
With that in mind, her vision for the show was to convey a connection between contemporary ceramics and works from across millennia. When she started thinking conceptually about the medium, Talbot-Kelly said, she realized that while ceramics are used in everything from dentures to architecture to the tech industry, encounters with historical ceramics from across the globe mainly fall into two broad categories: “You’re looking at vessels, or you’re looking at figures, right?”
That framework is a useful one for perusing the show, perhaps especially when the works embrace both categories. That’s true of Johnson artist Chiara No‘s two extraordinary contributions, “Bason” and “The Sibyl,” each about 7 inches tall. Both are inspired by the artist’s study of demonology and history.
According to No’s website, “Bason” is based on a 1577 European description of a sometimes invisible, question-answering demon, which the artist believes was an interpretation of a mythical Japanese fire-breathing chicken. Her version is a bell; when lifted, its hidden feet become clappers creating a beautiful, clear tone. “The Sibyl,” sporting many eyes, a triangular mortarboard hat and bright yellow sandals, is an incense burner; when lit, smoke pours out of her four breasts. Bright colors and No’s attention to strange detail make both objects seem at once new and ancient.
Warren potter Pamela Day’s functional ceramics are more subdued but also create something novel from an older form. Her stoneware vases — plain reddish clay on the outside with blue-gray glaze on the inside — each combine two offset vessels, as though the same piece from two universes had accidentally intersected itself. They are simple and striking. In her statement, Day says her forms are “what happens when objects in our field of vision line up just so, like chance encounters.”
Anne Thiam, from Andover, Mass., presents one of the show’s larger pieces with “By the Numbers,” a sculptural installation about mass incarceration. A stacked series of square ceramic forms, 11 inches to a side and held apart by metal posts, rises 56 inches high. Circles stamped in its sides — some 1,600 of them — with protruding toothpick-like spines represent individuals executed in the U.S. since 1976; an additional 200 empty holes near the top represent exonerated death row inmates. A kind of hourglass form drips from that top level, like a stalactite made of bones. There is no figure in this piece, but the bodies it implies are unmistakable.
Thiam’s other, smaller works in the show are less conceptually complicated. Her strange, urchin-like forms seem to float up a wall and perch on a shelf, with organic ridges, bumps and tentacles signaling possible life. Like many of the works in the show, they recall objects even older than ceramics: fossils, which really are just bodies, turned to earth.
Related events
‘Earthen’
Location: Mad River Valley Arts Gallery, 5031 Main St., #2 Village Sq., Waitsfield
This article appears in Jun 25 – Jul 1, 2025.
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