The creative act is threaded through a great precariousness – a canyon of the ordinary, reconstellated. Maybe both a terror and a miracle. It’s the things in the world very close to us that have a way of flipping into the fog.
Armstrong was an artist who aimed to continually puzzle out, provoke and play with the form and definition of clay. Her works range from cow hides, breasts and ceremonial protective aprons to the more traditionally utilitarian objects like vases, plates and bowls, but always with an interest in embracing the imperfections of the medium.
There is an enduring tension between this sense of transfiguration in O’Keeffe’s paintings and the artist’s resistance to any attempt to displace her subjects with metaphor.
The potter-god and the creation of breathing clay is a story repeated in many tongues, many times over. The Abrahamic God, the Yoruba spirit, Obatala, the Greek Prometheus, the Egyptian deity, Khnum, and on and on were all the first potters of the human body, adding breath and blood and water to the clay.
When it doesn’t have to arrive or resolve, and when the heartbreak of the unresolvable thing can be thought about without having to be fixed, ‘perfectionism’ in creative practice can somehow be used to exceed or undo itself.
Surviving a collision of ‘text’ and ‘object’ identities – somehow existing as neither and both – art books are interesting because we don’t quite know what they are, and so we can think about them in as many ways as we like.
Humans have been mining and making things with clay for more than 30 thousand years. Long before formal agriculture, it seems that the worldwide use of clay — for pots, buildings, sculptures, ritual practices, pigments, medicine — is one of the most ancient human things.
