We are going to start by looking at three works of art that are made with clay and are all in the shape of bowls.
But let’s begin with an illustration of a bowl. Do you see a skinny arm revealing a torn and ragged shirt? The arm is raised holding a bowl in the palm of its hand like it’s begging for more. The illustration is bleak, not many details but the lines the artist does use are significant. Let’s look at the bowl again. It’s not an ordinary bowl, look at the lines on the side, these lines are your clue. It’s actually a globe of the world cut in half to look like an empty bowl. The visuals tell us, the viewer, a story but if you need more clues the tattered sleeve has the word Hunger on it and at the top of the work it says Empty Bowl.
Let’s have a conversation. If you could reach into the half-empty world globe and pull out a secret note, what would it say? How long do you think the hidden note was in the bowl? The artwork was created in 1966.
Now let’s look at a ceramic bowl. It’s quite small, only 3 by 6 inches. It will fit in the palm of your hand but this artist isn’t depicting the bowl as a symbol for begging or asking for more, she is illustrating on the outside of the bowl Four Seasons, which is the title of the work. Do you see the tree? What season do you think the tree is representing?
Let’s have a conversation. The bowl has the four seasons on the outsides of it, when you turn the bowl you can see each tree grouping. What’s interesting is the seasons are on a circular bowl, not a linear form where there is a place to start and end. Seasons are fluid, they come and go, pass into each other, and at times slowly overlap. Charles Burchfield, a watercolorist, was fascinated with the seasons and the passage of time in nature. He thought seasons were circular too. If you could reach into the Four Seasons Bowl and pull out a tiny hidden sketch of a tree, what would it look like?
This bowl is made with clay too. If by accident we drop a ceramic bowl it would break into many pieces. The artist knows the viewer, us, has this knowledge and uses it while she designed this work of art. She tore the clay bowl on purpose and sewed it up with thread to make it look like it was broken or cracked. This bowl isn’t holding anything in particular but it is significantly holding the meaning of a repaired rip.
Let’s have a conversation. If you could slip a piece of paper in this bowl what would you like to say to the artist? Would you ask what happened to her that made her think of making this? Was the meaning of a ripped clay bowl a metaphor for life or of an event in the world?
The clay bowls we have been looking at and talking about are all handmade. This bowl may look like it was constructed by hand but it is not. The artist used a 3-D printer to create the artwork in the material of clay. He wanted to use the tools of our contemporary digital society at hand as a creative instrument.
Let’s have a conversation. Does an artwork that uses technology instead of the artist's hand become less or more valued? Use technology to write the artist a message about your opinion of using a 3-D printer to create his clay bowl.