Art Articles & Reviews

} Keith Campbell: The Figure Emerging (New Work in Clay) By Gil McElroy Ontario-based ceramist Keith Campbell has staked his career on a thorough exploration of the possibilities of porcelain. In the 1980s and early 1990s, his work came under the stylistic influence of rococo and the baroque; sequences of plates, bowls and vessels of curvaceous, sinuous form were the hallmark of the period, works with tremendous visual fluidity and motion that seemed to grasp for the unattainable goal of unarrested movement. Ghost In the body of recent work that comprised this exhibition at the White Water Gallery in his hometown of North Bay, Ontario, Campbell opted for the visual expression of motion of another kind, one integral to the very essence of the thrown clay vessel form. Campbell has given porcelain a twist. Literally. These 23 pieces, while ostensibly investigating the sculptural (i.e. figurative) possibilities of clay, also experimented with the visual expression of torque. In a nutshell, while the human body was central to much of Keith Campbell's newest work, a significant portion of it had everything to do with the screw. Now, the screw is a form indeed central to ceramics, or, more accurately, to wheel-thrown or coil-form clay. On the wheel, the screw is the only path that can be taken by clay as it rises in the hands of the ceramist, as a clay mass becomes a vessel. The screw is the initial, underlying condition of the ceramic object, however much we might prefer to ignore it. Movement in Yellow But, like it or not, it is there, narratively tracing out the creation of a meaningful form from a meaningless clay mass. It just happens that, in some of Keith Campbell's newest work, the proverbial background noise that is the state of the screw in contemporary ceramics has been promoted to the foreground figure of an actual signal. Campbell, in short, wants us to see it. Case in point: the porcelain vessel Ghost. Higher than it is wide, Ghost reaches a point where the lip of the vessel has collapsed in upon itself. The form exhibits a structural instability that precludes any possibility of functionality. As a vessel, it teeters at the very brink of utter failure. As a screw, however, it makes overt the condition of its very making, spiraling upward and leaving flabby clay love handles sagging in its wake as evidence of its passage. Classic Vase Movement in Yellow exhibits many of the same features: initially a thrown porcelain vessel, its form has been warped and deformed by hand, pinched and poked, and in the end girdled with a single love handle rising, screw-like, along the lower half of the piece. Both Ghost and Movement in Yellow occupied one end of Campbell’s recent clay spectrum. The end opposite it was comprised of work of a purely figurative bent, like Classic Vase, in which the thrown vessel form was then configured by hand to form a woman’s torso, its softly curving belly, dimpled navel, and cleft buttocks matched to a pair of disproportionately stubby legs. Figure Emerging Most works, though, occupied center ground, where thrown clay screw and figurative impetus collided headlong. Figure Emerging twists up from its base to become handmade deformations of the thrown vessel form that resemble just what its title states: figurative elements - arms and legs - only just asserting themselves within the clay surface. With Stepping Out, Campbell pushes the mix to the absurd extreme, the screw of thrown clay evolving into a pair of legs, one extending well out beyond the underlying vessel form and kicking upwards so high as to give the work a passing resemblance to a long-necked goose. With his newest work, Keith Campbell has dispensed with the need to borrow from a antique decorative style. Instead, he has opted for a sculptural direction that acknowledges and even embraces its source in the wheel-thrown vessel, while simultaneously pushing beyond it. It’s a difficult balancing act, though the rewards of mastering it can be enormous. Here’s hoping he succeeds. ___________________________________________ Copyright © 2002 Gil McElroy Gil McElroy is a critic, independent curator, artist, and poet currently living in Colborne, Ontario. His latest books are Gravity & Grace: Selected Writing on Contemporary Canadian Art (Gaspereau Press), and a book of poetry, Dream Pool Essays (Talonbooks). View Gil's curriculum vitae.