Gareth Mason
Jason Jacques Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of Wild Clay, an exhibition that dives into famed British ceramist Gareth Mason’s iconoclastic approach to pottery.
Clay has languor and vigor. It has an air of un-tamability, an innate wildness, both in terms of its deliriously banal natural origins (clay may playfully be referred to as luxury mud) and its intriguingly capricious behavior inside the kiln.
It’s fire alone that can transform this indeterminate, vacillating substance into a material as fragile and changeful as it is hard and pure. This duality gives rise to an enticing tension; when looking at a work by Gareth Mason one can’t help but imagine the split-but-not -broken pots blazing up a riot inside the inferno of a kiln.
These complex vessels wear bits of wild clay amidst repurposed shards of pottery past and and glimmering droplets of gold luster— resplendent, molten, metallic tears. This is pottery that challenges porcelain’s pristine history, developing as raw and unadulterated an approach to clay as the medium will allow.
In the artist’s own words— “We love glittering things brought into being by forces beyond our ken. We want to bear witness and to know awe. Clay has this potential in spades.”
