[/caption]I had the pleasure of meeting Wendy Tuxill a couple of weeks ago at Woman Made Gallery where she was dropping off her entry for the Drawing on Experience show. Wendy is what I call a frontier artist, she is pushing her concepts and art-making out to the very edges of what is possible. By this I mean the American definition wherein the frontier is the boundary between a settled known set of places beyond which is empty land and unknown territory. Wendy is taking her work and venturing out into those unknown places.
Wendy is pouring and forming porcelain slip, drawing with it, sculpting with it. She calls it 'conceptual' ceramics, pushing this extremely fragile medium out to its very furthest edge.
The essence of pottery and its making is that is a contradictory set of materials. Pottery is extremely useful, becoming dishes, cook-ware, and storage, and yet can be made to be purely sculptural. Pottery is demonstrably the oldest and most durable of all human-made materials, it is the first thing that archaeologists look for and find at all pre-historic sites. It will shatter but the shards will remain and endure. Fragility and endurance through time are the contradictory qualities of pottery.
Porcelain similarly carries with it these contradictory qualities, as it is has a high amount of glass which adds strength and hardness, but also makes it more brittle, even as it is more elastic to work with before firing.
Another contradiction contained in the materials of pottery and porcelain is they are base, dug out of the earth, fired at high temperatures and have the benefit of generations of technical expertise and technology passed on through the years. Clay is also one of the most familiar and durable building materials, in its adobe form, mixed with straw in a dry climate, in its wattle and daub form, slabbed onto woven saplings and whitewashed to make it more waterproof.
So, in looking at and thinking about Wendy Tuxill's art, I can't help but think about Andy Goldsworthy's approach to the concept of fragility. Wendy's art, like all art, begs to be touched, and it not only appears to be extremely fragile, but it is absolutely visibly apparent that it is extremely breakable. I find my mental hands reaching out and pulling back at this piece in the exhibit.
Both Tuxill and Goldsworthy are making statements about the nature of fragility with their art pieces. Goldsworthy, in a sense, is inviting the viewer to touch and destroy his intensely natural found sculptural objects, balanced precariously on themselves, knowing that sooner or later, they will melt, blow away or even rot. Tuxill's pieces play with the notions of fragility in a material that hopes and prays for endurance through many generations. Goldsworthy plays with the fragility of objects that at times will not even last through the day.
It's not merely that Tuxill's pieces say "don't touch me," built in to their existence is the absolute certainty that to touch is to destroy. She is pushing the porcelain slip from its liquid existence to a very delicate, ethereal solid, pushing against time. I look forward to seeing more.
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