Mud & What it Makes
5:00 - 6:30 pm, Tuesdays (all sessions occur online, Central Daylight Time)
August 4, 11, 18, 25, September 1 (5 sessions), $300
Clay Houston members, $250
Limit 10 participants
*Tuition scholarships available
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In this seminar, we will consider work that uses mud as material and/or metaphor in 20th and 21st century visual art. Intersecting at crucial points with the discourse around clay and ceramics, we will look at mud’s formlessness, its messy ambiguities, and political suggestiveness in specific historical contexts. We will consider how a muddy discourse has affected writing about ceramics, and we will look at ceramists who bridge performance, pedagogy, sculpture, and social practice through their explorations of mud and its many cultural meanings. Case studies will include work by artists from the U.S., Central, and South America.
Mud is inherently messy, somewhere between dirt and water, between solid form and its dissolution. In this workshop, we look at how artists and craftspeople have used mud to make sculpture, installation, video, and performance. We draw thematic connections between ceramics traditions and conceptual art and performance, and we consider a history of 20th and 21st century artists’ interventions in the material. Readings will include poetry, art history, and artists’ writings, in which we consider mud as material and as metaphor, and in which we think carefully about points of intersection between mud work and ceramic history.
This seminar is specifically designed for artists and makers with an interest in clay, but is open for any participant interested in contemporary art, the environment, functional design, domestic space, messiness, dirt, and/or performance.
Participants will be asked to watch a short video presentation each week (approx. 20-30 minutes), with a related reading assignment (approx. 10-20 pages prose or up to 7 pages poetry). On Tuesday evenings, we will meet as a group via Zoom to workshop the ideas from the week’s topic. The Zoom conversation will include space for creative brainstorming, breakout sessions with small groups, and conversation expanding upon the images and histories from the week’s assignment.