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Jay Strommen:
"Ferment of Time"

May 12 -June 23, 2000
Mon-Thurs: 7 PM-10PM;
Sat: 10 AM-5 PM.

Gallery Park West
719 West Wrightwood
Chicago, Illinois 60614
Telephone: 773/ 296-2160
www.galleryparkwest.com

They are of earth, and of fire; and art. They are the art in stoneware of Jay Strommen: over eighteen pieces on display until June 23, 2000, in "Ferment of Time," a new showing at Park West Gallery, Chicago. Jay Strommen noted that ceramics is akin to alchemy: a very working, tactile exploration of compounds, materials; and often uncertain results. In ceramics, the artist works with the essences thought by the alchemists to be fundamental: Earth and Air, Fire and Water. In these works by Strommen, Earth and Fire forge their own marks of identity. The artist transmutes the elementals into an art of decay, persistence and renewal -- the very offspring of time -- a "Ferment of Time."

In a genre such as ceramics, it is not always easy for many to set aside preconceptions. Ceramic artist Val M. Cushing notes the lingering ambiguity: "The vessel maker intends his or her work to function as art, but the work is likely to be rejected from the art world because it may look like pottery -- and pottery is not in that world." But the unbiased do "...understand and appreciate the visual statement and the ritual and spiritual content of the vessel." Although the old prejudice of 'craft vs. fine art' has abated in recent decades, it is always the individual artist's work which sets the standards, within a tradition and over the course of his own career: The artist's work stands on its own merits.

Val M. Cushing, in his introduction to The Ceramic Design Book: A Gallery of Contemporary Work (Lark Books: 1998) outlined the useful categories of ceramic art: "pottery, vessels, sculpture, and architectural ceramics." By his criteria: "... vessels have the general look of pottery, their use is irrelevant," adding "A vessel's meaning therefore lies in the area of visual or spiritual fulfillment." "Ferment of Time" centers on the ceramic vessel, and many of the items are worked from slabs of wet clay, pinched, fashioned, hand-formed individually. In "Ferment of Time," some works present a series, which maintains a single 'series number' for all the individual pieces. (This was, at first, a bit disorienting.) The pieces-in-series represent consecutive acts in 'working out' an initially vaguer inspiration. The "Ferment of Time" lies within the artist; his firings document the evolution.

Several pieces in "Ferment of Time" are particularly eye-catching. There are two "Bottle Rocket" series, a large and a small. The works of each series reveal the artist passing through permutations of a theme, each time evolving, honing the initial impulse driving his expression. The general impression in the "Bottle Rocket" variations is one of old skins -- a pupa, peeling off from the new form hidden within. The slabs of hand-molded clay are pinched, pressed to evoke the casting off of shells, husks... vegetive sepals. From within, a new, future vessel emerges. On several pieces in the "Bottle Rocket" (large) series, "MM," the current year in Roman numerals, is visible at their base; on another, the surface of the inner, emergent vessel bears what at first seems an almost Asian 'artist's stamp.' Such marks now play in the aesthetic of the piece, but the original source lies within the artist's apprenticeship... a gesture toward the physical touch of material, a 'feel,' and even more, a symbol, a seed to betoken future fecundity of work. The marks evolve -- there is no finality, just continued ferment. The original marks were either pine tree or oak, familiar foliage of the artist's childhood along Minnesota's Mississippi. The "Bottle Rocket" concept in fact grew out of Strommen's contact with ceramicist Peter Voulkos; "Bottle Rocket" as an image or archetype for what Strommen terms his 'explosion of self,' the young artist's freeing of his art from earlier mentors and inspirators. Voulkos has been noted for his abstractions in clay, but in the "Bottle Rocket" pieces, Jay Strommen declares an autonomy. They arise as an emblem of emergence, the alchemist's cocoon opening through earth and fire.

Jay Strommen removed his three "Untitled Platters" from the kiln the morning of the exhibition. They were slow-fired, which explains the integrity of the material, despite their stone inclusions, difficult apertures and molding. The coppery patches, the granular and varying surface textures, the interplay of subtle color, achieved in the artist's use of Manganese Dioxide, Copper Carbonates, and 'industrial frit,' all reflect their birth in earth and fire, as well as Strommen's alchemy in experimentation. Strommen has been attracted to working with salt kilns, an approach particularly active in Germany. Indeed, Strommen, in such techniques as atmospheric firing, testing the effects of ambient vapors in salt firing, the free and serendipitous side-effects of unsampled impurities, the ambivalent presences in natural salts, woods, earths -- the 'imps of fires' -- all this bespeaks his early impression, and a current metaphor, of ceramics as alchemy...a toying with part and process in search of new secrets.

In Strommen's current showing, the character of aging and its expression in artifact equally engage the artist. At times, what is not seen to re-emerge, is captured as reassembled and re-shaped. In "Ferment of Time," there are nine such 'reconstructed' vessels in a series of Tea Bowls, and a similar motif is carried into other, single pieces. In display, these works are an effective contrast to the "Bottle Rocket" series. They play "vessel" against its utilitarian genesis, and insinuate the role of time which tempts one to forget that so many of our museum items, the Attic urns and Ming vases and such, began in use, and were only later lifted into art. As such, these Strommen works suggest affinities with examples of fine ceramicists such as Bowl by Kari Christensen (Porcelain: d.15 cm.:Norway: 1976), or Oracle by Toni Warburton (Earthenware: h.26 cm.:Australia: 1983) [In The New Ceramics: trends + traditions by Peter Dormer, (Thames and Hudson: 1986)].

Of individual works, Mayan Warrior (1999) particularly lingers in mind. It melds not only the visual essentials of its title, but does so in a manner that further calls to mind the Mayan ruins which have yielded that imagery. It is a fortuitous medium for its theme; so much of what we have of past cultures resides in stone, whether natural and worked or fashioned and fired. In the elements of Mayan Warrior, one discerns a warrior's plates, corselets and greaves; incised tablets of depiction; fragments of architectural blocks.

Jay Strommen has noted his increasing attraction toward earth kiln techniques, an interest already aroused in 1993, prior to the current increased favor. At the same time, he is drawn to high temperature firing, the 3,000 or 4,000 degree range (Cone 9-10 in ceramicist parlance). Perhaps because of the current popularity of the earth kiln trend, Strommen is gravitating to high temperature firings.

The ceramic art in "Ferment of Time" offers solid work, intelligent and creative. In its individual exploration of technique and expression, it does employ high craft, but in this, it calls forth the caveat of Bernard Leach:

"...at the very beginning it should be made clear that the work of the individual potter or potter-artist, who performs all or nearly all the processes of production with his own hands, belongs to one aesthetic category, and the finished result of the operations of industrialized manufacture, or mass-production to another and quite different category."

A Potter's Book,
(London, Faber & Faber: 1940)
[In The Culture of Craft,
Peter Dormer, Ed.,
(Manchester University Press: 1997)]

The art in "Ferment of Time," however, in the effects and impressions it leaves, in its mark of Fire and Earth, conjures the words of Goethe's Faust. Faust, turning to alchemistic sorcery, with unease and in fear summons forth elemental spirits. The one alone that quiets and strengthens -- that he welcomes, is the Earth spirit:

A curious change affects me in this sign:
You, kindred Sprite of Earth, come strangely nearer;
My spirits rise, my powers are stronger, clearer,
As from the glow of a refreshing wine.

Johann Wolfgang Goethe,
Faust/Part I
(Penguin Classics: 1963)

Jay Strommen's sculptures in earthware, "Ferment of Time," will be on display at Park West Gallery, 719 West Wrightwood, Chicago, until June 23, 2000. Jay Strommen has recently been graduated from the Art Institute of Chicago. Park West Gallery's phone number is: 773/ 296-2160. The gallery website can be accessed at http:www.galleryparkwest.com

--G. Jurek Polanski

Jurek Polanski has previously written and art edited for Strong Coffee in Chicago. He's also well known and respected among the Chicago museums and galleries. Jurek is currently a Visual Arts Correspondent for ArtScope.net.

Editor's Note: Books mentioned in www.artscope.net are often in print and may be ordered through this website's Barnes & Noble link. Additional recommnded reading is: The Culture of Craft by Peter Dormer (Manchester University Press: 1997); The Ceramic Design Book: A Gallery of Contemporary Works (Lark Books: 1998); and The Unexpected: Artists' Ceramics of the 20th Century (Kruithuis Museums/H.N.Abrams: 1998).