Lauren Mabry’s Inquiries

Lyn Horton
May 2019

Lauren Mabry, FUSED, 2019, Installation View, image courtesy of Ferrin Contemporary

The fine line between art and craft is the subject of a dance that has been going on for centuries, either through cultural assessment or in the eyes of artists. Along with that dance is a subsidiary debate regarding form and function. There is no reason to prefer any equation over another in either didactic stream. The key is how each characteristic is actualized: form, function, craft, art.  And, in the end, all are one.

Embodying this universal scheme of things is the work of ceramic artist, Lauren Mabry, on exhibit at Ferrin Contemporary in North Adams, MA.

Mabry is in her mid-thirties. Her work evokes the vitality of youth and the forward thinking and determination of a mature artist to forge unforgettable clay statements.

Mabry began, over a decade ago, to examine the idea of the vessel. She turned a simple cup on its side, which action made it more than a cup; her action forced the viewer to see the cup as a non-functional object. The painting/glazing inside of the cup set the direction for the future of her pottery-making techniques. She valued the structure of form in parallel with the chemistry of glazing. The cylinder became a comfortable vehicle for her on which to apply glazes and the color combinations thereof.  By being persistently curious and fearless, she established her own mental how-to glaze manual for her process on repeated cylindrical forms, which ranged in size from that of a small paint can to as large as a marble or stone segment used once to build an ancient column.

Lauren Mabry, FUSED, 2019, Installation View, image courtesy of Ferrin Contemporary

The exhibit at Ferrin Contemporary is named “Fused.” This title encapsulates the essence of her journey.

Each object suggests three-dimensional abstract expressionism with glaze as the material of her brushstrokes and clay surfaces as her canvases. She creates endless conversations between eye-popping color juxtapositions that float within the transparent loops which she makes out of glazes. She hangs the glasslike loops on pegs made of cut-clay coils that jut out repeatedly at regular intervals from the painted/glazed clay surfaces which constitute the sides of quasi-vessels or behave as simple single independent vertical sheets.

Lauren Mabry, FUSED, 2019, Installation View, image courtesy of Ferrin Contemporary

The scale of the art work ranges from large (twenty-four inches high) on-the-floor or pedestal-born objects to small (ten inches square) delicate loop and peg-ridden wall-hung slabs. Everything that is feminine can be associated with these pieces as exemplified by the glaze curls poised on the pegs and the sensuous reflective hues coating the rectilinear rectangles of clay. Everything that is whimsical flourishes in the clay coils, poking out as pegs from the objects or stretched and attached in relaxed grids that stand on their own to become portraits of joy and play. Yet, the art’s neutrality looms in the suggestion of the courage that it takes to push the mere testing of materials into bona fide products and the manufacture of sculpture.

Several pieces, though, indicate moves outside of the predominant spectrum of work in the exhibit, yet, which are in keeping with her original gestures of discovery with the cup.  She turns seemingly solid brick forms on their sides and allows their glazes to drip onto the forms below. The glazes harden. The results become attenuated links to unite form to form and, at the same time, to solidify the distance between form and pedestal.  The focal point becomes the glaze glass support between the brick and pedestal. What acted as a dynamic fluid element in the creation of the piece has been brilliantly suspended in the course of fusing one part to another.

The intuition that has transformed Mabry’s work has integrity. Whatever substance is filling the hollow vessels may appear to be real or is actually even invisible and only air but quite clearly marks the vestiges of the artist’s intellectual drive and pursuit of successful magical experiments. Mabry is inviting the audience into her line of questioning.

Lauren Mabry, FUSED, 2019, image courtesy of Ferrin Contemporary

LAUREN MABRY: FUSED
May 4 – June 30

Ferrin Contemporary
1315 MASS MoCA Way, North Adams, MA

Lyn Horton has been an artist for over forty years dedicated to maintaining a whole life experience now more than ever. She has a long history writing about creative improvised music for well-known publications, reviewing recordings, interviewing musicians and composing editorials. She has exhibited her art work extensively and is represented by the Cross MacKenzie Gallery outside of Washington, D.C. Horton was commissioned in 2012 to do a piece for the US Embassy in Vientiane, Laos. Her photography can be seen on Instagram.

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