Sara Morris

My dissertation examines the methods by which West Coast ceramic sculpture troubled aesthetic and cultural conventions of the statue, the monument, and the figurine, renegotiating sculpture’s historic limitations during the late twentieth century. I argue that artists trained in studio ceramics defamiliarized the conventions of modern sculpture, effectively politicizing human forms at a time of bodies’ participation in three wars, brewing social movements, and protests.

My goal for this project is to argue for the conceptual sophistication of figurative ceramics within the history of postwar art by bringing attention to the important but understudied works of artists on the West Coast, including Robert Arneson, Viola Frey, and Patti Warashina. Supported by the postwar boom in teaching positions in newly established college and university art departments, such as the University of California ceramics departments at Berkeley and Davis, ceramists experimented with new ideas and ways of making outside of the mainstream commercial system. The modality of ceramics has the capacity to formally and conceptually invest three-dimensional handmade objects with a bodily presence or weighty corporeality through the interplay of form, language, and labor. As such, handmade ceramic objects become vehicles for bodily metaphor, ideal for addressing midcentury gender and material hierarchies due to the medium’s associations with domesticity and kitsch.

The figurative ceramics that will form the focus of my study do not connote a discrete art movement so much as they describe a style of work that pushed back against self-referential, gestural art forms, such as Abstract Expressionism. In dialogue with the discourses of modernist sculpture and craft, this project broadens the sculptural methodology proposed by William C. Seitz in his exhibition, Art of Assemblage (Museum of Modern Art, 1961) to explore craftsmanship―applied manual skill―alongside issues of size and material-specificity. I utilize literary theorist Susan Stewart’s theories of scale in which she argues that bodily narratives of the miniature and the gigantic mediate our experience of the world. In mobilizing this framework, I will reconfigure clay as a medium that not only animates traditional figurative forms, but also the body.