Kathy Butterly: Color In Forming

For nearly 30 years, Kathy Butterly has created striking ceramic sculptures with a powerful individuality that evince her technical mastery of the medium. Her unparalleled explorations of form and color continue to expand the field of contemporary studio ceramics. While Butterly works on an intimate scale, complexity, virtuosity, and rigor are condensed in her vessels, each creating an expansive universe of its own.

The 24 new works in this exhibition are built upon Butterly’s realization that “the form never changes–it’s the color that changes the form.” Here, a relatively uniform shape is transformed through glazing, coloration, and ornamentation, parsing the balance between uniformity and difference. Giving herself a limited set of parameters, Butterly works within a reduced palette heavy on dusky purple-blues, egg-yolk yellows, silky whites, greens, and black, exploring how color responds and evokes mood.

All the works in this exhibition begin as a single cast form originating from a store-bought fishbowl, akin to a readymade. Butterly pours wet porcelain clay into a plaster mold, manipulating the unfired clay by pinching, pulling, folding, and carving, until she feels the work’s distinct form and personality emerge.

The sculpture is subsequently fired and glazed repeatedly–sometimes as many as 30 times–allowing her to build color and texture with accumulated layers of glaze and hand-carved ornamentation. Each sculpture is an exercise in the balance between chaos and control. For Butterly, who often works on a sculpture for as long as a year, continuously building color and defining the form, a work is only finished when it has an undeniable sense of presence.

These new works incorporate the mechanisms of their own display, literally fusing their supports into their sculptural forms. Each porcelain sculpture is set upon an earthenware block that she describes not as a pedestal, but as a podium: a place from which the work can speak. The podiums wrestle and commingle with the forms they support to create new, dynamically integrated sculptures that Butterly considers three-dimensional diptychs of sorts. These works reinforce Butterly’s insistence and conviction that a very small object can take up space on its own terms. As she notes, “it’s not the scale of the work, it’s the power of its presence.”