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WARREN MACKENZIE Congress Street Gallery Please click images above for full view.
As a functional potter I make about 5000 individual pieces of pottery every year. To think of them as works of art is foolish, but I do hope that they communicate something of what I feel regarding personal expression in pottery. My main interest is in the form, surface and gesture of making. I am working with the same elements that a painter or sculptor uses, but the results are completely different. A potter first attracts the eye through form, color, textures, gesture, and possibly decorative devices. Eventually, due to the nature of the work, such things as weight, balance, tactile reactions, and suitability to function begin to engage us.
Out of a kiln load of hundreds of pots, only a few reach out strongly to the user. Out of this small number, even fewer will continue to engage the senses after daily use. These seem to tap a source beyond the personal and deal with universal experience. They are not necessarily amenable to intellectual analysis, and, in fact, that analysis can destroy a person's real appreciation and understanding of a piece. Some pots just feel right, and a person who is open will know them. If given time to absorb the inner nature of the work and its maker, this person can share in the creative act that produced the piece.
Excerpted Maine Sunday Telegram review by Philip Isaacson, March 13, 2005
I greet the news that there are multiple universes with
applause. If there are enough of them, one among them should
surely embrace a point at which all good and simple things are
joined. In that universe, Shaker boxes with their exquisitely
conceived fingers, Danish chairs of a half-century ago that
bring the balance between the character of wood and its
acquiescence to form to a point in which they reach
universals, and small pots achieved in Korea 400 years ago
would be bathed in a golden light.
I cannot offer you golden light in our current universe, but I
can suggest a way of establishing what such light may be like.
It involves a trip to the June Fitzpatrick Gallery Congress
Street location and an easy surrender to the pleasure of its
current exhibition. The event is called "Two American Potters"
and offers current work by Warren MacKenzie and Sequoia
Miller. Mr. MacKenzie is the preeminent American studio
potter. He is a legend in his own time for commitment,
integrity and a maker of small pots that touch your heart.
Availability is the ethos--the root--of the studio potter
and both MacKenzie and Miller are staunch adherents to the
creed. Each produces objects that are at once modest,
dignified, harmonious and, in every case, intended for use.
Neither would accept the term fine arts potter (or ceramic
artist or some similar title) although both are creators of
forms that reflect wondrous moments in art. The simplicity,
the visual and functional integrity, the urgings to use
embodied in their work are so exquisitely compounded that they
warm the place in which you store your aesthetics. The
emotional bond between the potter and the user is so direct
and on so primal a level that MacKenzie's and Miller's pots
become an extension of the user's persona. They become a part
of your life without intimidation. This does not imply that I
use my examples of their work with relaxation. I don't.
I grant them the greatest respect and consider myself the
recipient of their makers' generosity. Wide use is fundamental
to the concept of the studio potter and that implies modest
charges. Those who have attended past shows of Miller's work
at the Fitzpatrick will understand this. The prices dictated
by MacKenzie and Miller are so far below what a gallery show
normally implies, that the work is broadly affordable. But
supply never meets demand and this contributes a wistful
quality to ownership. You're encouraged to use the work, but
if you break it you probably can't replace it, so use it
carefully.
Both artists work from the wheel, although Miller, at times,
can belie that point. In fact, for some time I thought that
many of his pieces were built from small slabs.
MacKenzie's pots speak with utter authority. Their pedigree is
immaculate--the Korean Yi Dynasty, Shoji Hamada and the
Japanese Craft Movement and the legendary British potter,
Bernard Leach--and is beyond duplication. He is our remaining
touch with the first half of the 20th century. The fact that
he is still producing and that his work is increasingly
intense is one of nature's rare grace notes. To touch his
pieces in this show is to touch Hamada and Leach while, in
their own right, to touch objects made wonderful through a
reduction to emotional essentials, a process achieved with
certainty and conviction. His work comes to us as a
benediction.
Sequoia Miller is the more vivacious of the two. He holds to
the prescriptions of order and utility while contributing his
personal gift of animation. At times his pots touch on
Modernism. Those that do are strictly constructed, have little
memory of the wheel and embrace abstraction. Miller's pieces
are rarely at rest, and when light dances near them, they
dance with it. There is a sense of anticipation about Miller's
work that is irresistible.
Congress Street Gallery
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