Ceramics Art & Perception: Richard Swanson
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The Arts of Slipcasting and Jitterbugging: April 1, 2002
 show overview
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by Rick Newby for Flow is important to Richard Swanson, and so are the relationships among forms. It is no surprise, then, that this sculptor should be drawn to the flowing forms found in dance, ancient and modern. Based in Helena, Montana, Swanson works in clay and with a variety of other materials (mattress ticking, window screen, baling twine, straw, peat moss, barbed wire, sheet aluminum, steel, bronze, cardboard)-and he has created a number of his non-ceramic forms specifically to be danced with or among. (1) These works are generally human scale, and some of them move, suspended from ceilings or ducking and bobbing as their materials flex. Others, while remaining perfectly still, imply movement, but none are more expressive of joyful motion than Swanson's sculptural teapots fashioned from an iron-red clay reminiscent of certain Yixing clay bodies.
In the 1970s, Swanson began his career as a studio potter, and even today, he produces a line of plates, jars, cups, bowls, and other vessels that provide the foundation for all his artistic endeavors. From the beginning, his pots have sported his favorite creatures: leaping fishes, soaring birds, cavorting human figures. These forms, simplified and made animate through the quickness of his drawing, reflect his fascination both with the material world and with cultures whose relationships with nature seem much more "intimate and joyful" than our own. Swanson admits to an "envy and nostalgia" for that closeness. His own works, and his sculptural teapots in particular, champion an intimacy, with the shrinking natural world and the ever-recurring sensuality of bodies in motion, that we can still savor, despite the challenges of our sped-up, over-stimulated, hyper-real 21st-century existence.(2) Swanson's slipcast, limited-edition teapots, now twelve in number-the first created in 1991, the latest from 2001-are graceful, but also irrepressibly playful. They share with Swanson's totem creatures, birds and fishes, a "fluidity of shape" that is antic, nearly goofy, in its joyousness. They are rounded, voluptuous, the absolute opposites of Swanson's elegant barbed-wire sculptures, with their intimations of threat and danger. They are closer in spirit to Netsuke carvings of laughing Buddhas or Mixtec terra cottas of couples happily copulating than they are to the grave (and immobile) statuary of classical Western tradition. These "folk" sculptures by a sophisticated artist of the postmodern era possess an archaic and uncontainable liveliness. As Guy Davenport writes, "The archaic is one of the great inventions of the twentieth century." Just as the Renaissance looked back to Hellenistic Rome for its inspiration, argues Davenport, we have "looked back to a deeper past" in which we imagine we "see the very beginnings of civilization." (3) Pablo Picasso was one modern who found kindred spirits among ancient African sculptors and the Neolithic cave painters of Spain and France. In turn, Richard Swanson has been drawn to Picasso's ceramic work. Indeed, among Swanson's earliest sculptural explorations are works distinctly reminiscent of Picasso's seductive female figures and lively animal forms. Soon, however, Swanson found his own path into the archaic, resonating to "Inuit carvings, Pre-Columbian ceramics, African sculpture [and] to some extent Japanese netsuke carvings and Yixing teapots. . . ." He admired the "concise vocabulary of these pieces, their use of everyday life as subject matter, their compact forms, and their straightforward but unique way of relating figurative elements."(4) As he developed his own vocabulary, Swanson sought the perfect clay body, or the perfect combination of clay and glaze. In creating a group of one-of-a-kind sculptures-figurative works with titles like Birth, Vortex, and Goat Rider that were clear precursors, in approach and theme, to the teapots-he worked with a white clay body to which he applied terra sigillata, resulting in a rich red-brown surface. In works like Seated Lovers, he achieved a surface that mimicked stone, by applying terra sigillata mixed with copper to the bisqued piece and firing it in sawdust. While these works proved successful, even powerful, Swanson still wasn't satisfied; he wanted to achieve what he was coming to admire in Yixing ware: a purity of material, where no decoration beyond the sculptor's modeling is necessary. And then Swanson's good friend, Richard Notkin-the Montana-based sculptor who has been instrumental in introducing western ceramists to Yixing ware-shared with Swanson a clay body he had "come up with" for his own slipcast work. This clay mixture, super dense and finely textured, with a rich red coloration derived from its high iron content, proved ideal for Swanson's teapots. "It's really sensuous and burnishes beautifully," he notes, and "it needs no surface decoration." Swanson first encountered the notion of sculptural pots as limited editions in his study of Picasso's ceramics, and for his teapots, he found slipcasting to work beautifully, allowing him to create editions of up to twenty-two (the more complex pieces, like Fish Rider, have as few as twelve in an edition). Swanson first sketches his ideas for a teapot and then allows the details to "evolve from the clay." There is, he says, something about "designing for multiples that makes you hone down to essentials." Far from simple, his plaster molds can include up to thirteen ingeniously interconnecting pieces. After he removes the pieces from the mold, he assembles them "a little bit wet," applying slip to the joints and smoothing the surface. When the teapot is bone dry, he sands it with a fine mesh screen (used in perfa taping) and fires it to Cone 08. After bisquing, he smoothes the surface again, this time with 200 mesh sandpaper. He fires the pot a second time, to Cone 5, and completes the final burnishing with emery cloth, creating the satin-smooth surface that is these pots' signature. Swanson pays close attention to how he stacks his teapots in the kiln; he fires them alongside glazed pots-this lends them a sheen from the vaporizing glaze-but he doesn't want too much sheen. "I'm not looking for a glazed effect, just a 'color blush,'" he says. Swanson began the series (of slipcast teapots), in 1991, with Elephant Rider. The elephant, in his view, is an "amazing, simple form," and he followed his languorous elephant and rider with the harder-charging Elephant Runner the following year. These pots, with animals and humans melding into singular forms, led in 1993 to a purely human work, Sitting Pretty. In this playful teapot, a delighted woman sits astride the shoulders of her kneeling male partner. In another 1993 teapot, a similarly kneeling figure triumphantly holds aloft his Proud Catch, one of Swanson's beloved fish. A pair of fish take a male figure for a joy ride-a kind of water dance-in "Fish Rider", 1993. Swanson returned to the purely human with the rollicking "Jitterbug", 1995, his first teapot to directly acknowledge the importance of dance to his overall enterprise (his first collaboration with dancers, Building Bridges, had come the year before, and 1995 saw him collaborate on three separate dance/sculpture works). Perhaps Swanson's most beautifully realized teapot, Bird in Hand, 1995, features not a full human body, but a pair of graceful hands. While one hand cradles the bird, the other caresses its outstretched wing, forming a delicate and lovely arch. High Stepping, 1997, features a single exuberant dancer (with a gold ring through her belly button, the only non-ceramic element in the series), while a recent work, Leaping Lady, 2001, is a variation on Sitting Pretty, with a female figure balanced across the lap of her kneeling partner (a fancy dance move? a tender interlude in the midst of gymnastic lovemaking?). More robust are Swanson's "She" and "He" teapots, 1995 (a voluptuous pair of "He" and "She" tea bowls accompany them), as is Mermaid & Dolphin from 1996. Dancers and frolicsome fish, elephants and dolphins, cavorting lovers and birds at rest: Richard Swanson's sculptural teapots link us to our animal natures, the joys of movement, and some of the world's most vital traditions, archaic and otherwise. Like Yixing teapots and ceramic bottles from the Moche culture of Peru, they tell stories and invite touch, effortlessly embodying the unquenchable human imagination at play. Richard Swanson's non-ceramic sculptural work can be viewed at his website, www.richard.swanson.com. His teapots can also be seen ...at www.guild.com Rick Newby's articles and reviews on ceramic artists have appeared in American Craft, American Ceramics, Sculpture, High Ground, and Ceramic Review (UK). He is co-author of A Ceramic Continuum: Fifty Years of the Archie Bray Influence (2001) and The Most Difficult Journey: The Poindexter Collections of American Modernist Paintings (2002). He lives in Helena, Montana.
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"Jitterbug" Teapot, 1995
