Constellations
Danielle Krcmar: If I say the word “ceramics” the first image that comes to your mind is probably someone sitting at a potter’s wheel and throwing a pot or bowl or mug. While Jody Burr is an accomplished potter, her most recent work in the Hollister Gallery is neither functional nor is it thrown on the wheel. It is pure sculpture, but it’s also about drawing and uses deliberate, intense, selective color. The artist uses clay to see how she can explore lines both in glazing and surface treatments of the two wall series and the four “knot” sculptures. The top center square in the series on the far wall has a line that could be the map of a conversation with an old friend, a looping layered trail, which curves, strolls, loops back on itself as topics are touched, explored, left, returned to. Other drawings in this series appear to be inspired by the microscopic, closed shapes that suggest platelets or mitochondria. As Ms Burr explains in her artist’s statement, “the fluid, visual patterns of connection and transition that we encounter constantly and universally- social network diagrams, flocks of birds, light reflected against wind and water, neural pathways, cellular clusters” have a “deep resonance … in their simultaneous completeness- a sort of perfect, ineffable symmetry and balance- and their utter ephemerality.”
If you missed the show while it was at Babson, you can catch the artwork April 20- 23 at SOFA (Sculptural Objects and Fine Art) fair in New York: http://sofaexpo.com/NY/2012/index.htm
Some of Jody Burr’s Artwork
Danielle Krcmar, Babson Artist-in-Residence