Sally Campbell's new work applies exuberant color to traditional forms in ceramic works richly layered with personal narrative.
In the platters Plenty and Meant to Be Here, the vases Relax and Average, and the krater-like bowl House Dreams, Campbell layers forms referencing nature: birds, plants, snakes, rabbits. The images are painterly, both in the ordinary sense of being painting-like, and in the technical sense of Heinrich Wölfflin's distinction of painterly versus linear modes of description of form.1 If the images, painting-like, they are painting-like in a manner specific to painting with slip, underglaze, and glaze on ceramic works. Most saliently, the images are integral with the three dimensional form of the work. The layering of the forms of plants and diverse animals suggests both the layering of life forms found in nature without specifically depicting a fragment of landscape space, and the functioning of memory and perception in the experience of the natural world. That experience is not disembodied and detached from an individual, but always already integral to a specific self.
So also with the birds, which begin as thrown forms articulated into a bird structure. Wonderfully individual and animated in their gesture, Campbell's bird pieces are carriers of personal narrative. They echo the ancient tradition of οιωνοισι, of 'birds of omen.'2 Homer's reference engages an even broader tradition, of bird as portent, the subject of a mantic art.3 The motif of bird resting on a stick, branch or pillar as an oracle is found in the image on a Greek carved carnelian in the British Museum,4 and perhaps has its earliest known manifestation in Lascaux Cave. Be that as it may, here the bird forms have their narrative reference inscribed. In all of the pieces with one, two or three birds in a discrete environment, and particularly in the thirteen birds occupying the branch of Anxiety Tree, one has a sense of the birds as priojections of aspects of interiority onto the forms of the natural world, correlatives for the subjectivity of the self made object.
Sally M. Campbell is Visiting Assistant Professor of Art, the University of Texas at Tyler. Campbell received the Bachelor of Fine Arts, with honors, from the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University, and the Master of Fine Arts from the University of Florida, Gainesville. Recent exhibitions include: Style & Function: National Ceramics Invitational, Blue Spiral Gallery, Asheville, NC; Transformed: Altered Artist Books, Downtown Library, Gainesville, Florida. Her work will be exhibited in Line to Volume, in conjunction with the National Council on Education in the Ceramic Arts national conference, Louisville, KY, 2007.