In Place

BY ELIZABETH ESSNER

At first, defining the idea of place appears to be a simple equation—obvious, even. Look down at your feet, and there you are. Place would seem to be the wholly quantifiable result of person plus location. However, like all outwardly simple things, what appears on the surface to be concrete belies an expanse of shifting ground underneath.

In New Mexico’s White Sands National Park, anthropologists recently discovered thousands of tracks made by early humans. Among them: footprints of children jumping, a mother setting her baby down for a rest, and even the traces of someone walking for a mile and a half straight. (1) These people in their place, recorded in the earth more than twenty-three thousand years ago, now rewrite our understanding of basic history, marking human arrival to what is now the United States ten thousand years earlier than previously known. (2)

Place can shift our understanding of the world, yet its meaning eludes a strict definition. Pioneering cultural geographer Doreen Massey describes it as “a meet- ing place,” a nexus “constructed out of a particular constellation of social relations, meeting and weaving together at a particular locus.” (3) Philosopher Ed Casey argues for a phenomenological approach, defining place as “the immediate ambiance of my lived body and its history, including the whole sedimented history of cultural and social influences and personal interests that compose my life history.” (4)

Many who have historically sat outside the central narrative have often felt out of place, whether non-white, LGBTQ+, or historically marginalized by a physical or neurological trait outside of the norm. As recently departed theorist bell hooks reminds us, “One of the most vital ways we sustain ourselves is by building communities of resistance, places where we know we are not alone.” (5) Today through activism and collective action, newly formed communities have begun the hard work of replacing these narratives. Place reflects the world around us and ourselves within it.

Making Place Matter is rooted in this expanded definition of place, and clay is a remarkably astute messenger. It is at once universal, found on every continent and in every country, and yet, intensely local. It is made of the land and the life cycles it nurtures. As a result, it could be argued that clay is the material embodiment of place itself. Like us, clay bodies are defined by their place: the red terracotta of Peru, the Nile-brown clay of Egypt, the kaolin-rich earth of England and China. Each clay body can decree an artist’s vision. However, clay is not inert; it insists on finding its center.

While the idea of the center has often been defined by a singular middle ground, framed within the language of ceramics, it is individual. Each person must learn the skill of centering, their first step to magically transform a wobbly lump of clay into a vessel. “The outer shape of the clay is the extension of its center,” the poet-potter M.C. Richards wrote in her treatise Centering. “We press out from the center and make the pot: the outside is the surface of the inside.” (6)

Accordingly, in Making Place Matter, there is not one center but many, defined by who is standing in what place. Grounded in clay, Kukuli Velarde, Molly Hatch, and Ibrahim Said offer their places in this exhibition, centering their work on who they are and what they have inherited.

 

A Mi Vida

Kukuli Velarde was born in Peru and came to the United States in 1997. After attending art school, the artist moved to Philadelphia in 1977 to join The Clay Studio as a Resident Artist and has since remained. Rooting oneself in a new place can bring the old one into sharp relief. As a result, Velarde has spent nearly a lifetime confronting the complexity and painful effects of Western colonialism through her lived experience—from the visual landscapes of her native Peru to contemporary American life. “Aesthetics are like God,” Velarde says. “When you make art, it is shaped in your likeness. The aesthetic is created around you.” (7) Through her work, Velarde affirms the multiplicity of cultural and aesthetic understanding—from the ancient to the present, through her own Peruvian lens.

In this way, for Velarde the creation of art bears some likeness to the creation of a child. A Mi Vida (To My Vida), a series of sculptures based on her daughter Vida, intermingles both. In her own words, Velarde was late to motherhood. At the age of forty-five, she began to ask herself, “What does it mean to have a baby in your arms?” During this period, she painted Milky Dreams (2008). Here the artist depicts herself—part-Madonna, part-mermaid—holding an invisible child. Putti float above, surrounding her in a cloud-like halo. Three years later, Velarde became pregnant via IVF performed in Peru. A Mi Vida (2011) heralds the magic of her expectant body. Velarde painted her belly last, completing it one week before giving birth to her daughter Vida.

This painting foresees the sculptural series, A Mi Vida, which the artist began as her own Vida grew. These sculptures offered a way to prolong the sensation of holding her now elementary-age daughter Vida in her arms as a baby. Velarde marks the memory of her own hands, which rise like shadows from the bodies of these baby-formed vessels. She makes her touch visible, a guide for those who come to hold these works.

Motherhood, the artist says “is talking about that love that you never knew that you could feel.” Through Velarde’s experience as a mother, she found herself connected to the universal instinct to protect children. As a result, the project evolved from a personal response to motherhood into a rebuke against the trauma inflicted on children and families separated at the U.S.-Mexico border. The series exists as an installation where the works are exhibited together in strollers rather than as individ- ual sculptures, a way to embody the artist’s anguish at the tragedy of thousands of families separated. A reminder, Velarde says that “these children are as real as our children.” (8)

Holding the works is central to understanding the sense of protection, fragility, and the instinct for care they invoke. In a performance, the pieces return to the arms of their maker, Velarde, and are passed among women. Each is trusted with the fragile weight of creation. In Velarde’s words, “If I give you one of my pieces to hold, I can- not protect it. I’m giving you a responsibility that I do not know if you can manage, but I have to believe.”

Likewise, A Mi Vida X has been cast into unfired clay multiples, placed in sites around Philadelphia that are meaningful to the artist. Open to the elements and vis- ible to the community, these raw clay figures are left to be cared for, knowing that they may not be.

A keen student of art history, Velarde is aware that baby forms have often taken on important manifestations in the ancient arts of Mesoamerica. The famed Olmec baby forms from the Mexican state of Puebla are worthy of note in relation to the A Mi Vida series. (9) However, Velarde draws more directly from the renowned portrait ceramics of the Moche people of ancient Peru, a frequent point of reference for the artist.

As deftly as Velarde incorporates the past, the artist is equally expert at illuminating the present. Made in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, A Mi Vida VI takes the form of a bird whose beak is a mask. Removable, a child’s innocent face waits underneath. Its gentle questioning expression personifies the words etched on its head: “If I were your child would you care?” A Mi Vida IX is a vessel of a child grasping a beating heart in its arms. In it, the ache of fragility is met with the echo of its name Vida (Life), embodied within a single child and the collective body of society.

 

Linea

If motherhood is the generative force for Velarde, Molly Hatch’s childhood memories have fueled her artistic practice as an adult. Hatch takes objects of the past—often domestic decorative arts—as her primary source. These “precious witnesses to our stories,” as she has called them, serve as source material for her monumental ceramic installations. (10)

Ceramic plates are both givers and keepers of cultural memory, the nexus of Hatch’s exploration in her body of work for Making Place Matter. The artist began the project, as she often does, with museum sources. Drawn to Chinese export porcelain plates from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Hatch selected the famed. 1796 States plate from the presidential dinner service for Martha Washington. (11) Commissioned by a Dutch designer and produced in China to christen the newly born nation of America, it aptly demonstrates how a seemingly simple plate can symbolically and literally put it all on the table. The linked chain of fifteen states underscores the notion of national unity. A luxe golden sunburst inset with the First Lady’s monogram floats above the Latin motto meaning “Our union is our glory and our defense against him.” Hatch was particularly attentive to the plate’s subtle blue rim, a serpent eating its tail. Known as an ouroboros, this is an ancient symbol for the intrinsic connection between life, death, and rebirth.

In Ouroboros, Hatch’s response, the artist shifts this image of transformation from the edge of the original to put it squarely in the center. Illustrating the close ties between destruction and creation, blue and white snakeskin explodes across the surface of plates. The golden starburst radiates outwards, an echo of Washington’s golden star. Its luster becomes a mirror, a way for Hatch to signify that “we are still rethinking ourselves, rebirthing ourselves in that eternal cycle of recreating America.” (12)

Likewise, Philadelphia Waterworks is directly inspired by a circa 1825 blue and white plate depicting the Philadelphia Waterworks, the first municipal waterworks in the country. It depicts the site now occupied by the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where the plate now resides in their collection. As Hatch enlarges and abstracts the original imagery, its details are transformed, shifting their meaning. Some are amplified, while others disappear. The interspersed plates of lustered gold bring the viewer into the historical landscape, a portal to reflect the Philadelphia of today.

The artist often refers to her grandmother’s house where in her youth, Hatch was surrounded by eighteenth-and nineteenth-century European ceramics—some of which were brought as ship ballast from her American ancestor’s merchant ships. Fascinated, Hatch found their formality disconnected from her vastly different life growing up on a Vermont dairy farm. This tension between her rural upbringing and the distant ties of these inherited objects has, in turn, granted the artist both an insider’s and outsider’s view of the historical works with which she engages. As a result, her work simultaneously examines and abstracts historical patterns.

Lineages —both national and personal— are reflected in the final two related works: Linea and Linea Stack, named to “honor the idea of inheritance,” the artist explains. (13) Hatch was born into a long line of women artists. Her grandmother was a painter, and her mother was a farmer by trade who has maintained a painting practice. A floral textile from the collection of the Cooper Hewitt, was selected for its resonance with those found in the faded grandeur of her grandmother’s home. In Linea, Hatch imposes a grid onto the pattern’s wandering flowers. Lifted away from the wall onto pillbox forms, they are forced into circular clarity. Blank forms reinforce the pattern’s absence, perhaps akin to a family member whose physical presence is long gone but still felt.

Hatch has continually transformed the plate’s intimate scale into the monumental, an active assertion of taking up space, literally and figuratively. Linea Stack moves this into wholly new sculptural territory, off the wall into three dimensions. This sculptural leap takes up new artistic space as Hatch merges the snakeskin—and its transformational symbolism—with the ancestral influence of her grandmother’s floral. The allure of golden luster coats the edges of the hexagonal brick assemblage, further asserting its sculptural presence while nodding to the gold-tipped border of a porcelain plate.

 

On the Bank of the Nile

As with Hatch, lineages are vital to understanding the work of Ibrahim Said, whose artistry is informed by his ancestral connection to clay. Born into a family of potters, Said grew up learning the family trade in his homeland of Fustat, Egypt, a bustling, age-old center for ceramic production located just south of Cairo. Today, a U.S. citizen, the artist makes his home in North Carolina, where he blends his material expertise with his deep fascination for historical Egyptian pottery and Islamic art and architecture.

Said’s lifetime of skill could be seen as a way he carries his place with him, discovering new pathways in clay for Making Place Matter. Ever a student of the artistic riches of Islam, Said’s primary inspiration was the mashrabiya, an architectural element found throughout the Islamic world. These screens are a porous boundary between public and private space that offer shade, ventilation, and a physical delineation, wrapped in the language of geometry. Its beauty resides in both the screen itself, often made of wood, and in the cascades of patterned light that shine through its openwork panels.

Drawing on both the mashrabiya’s pattern and form, Said successfully undertook a nearly impossible task: crafting three carved ceramic panels, each nearly six feet high. In them, wood’s rigidity is replaced by clay’s distinct curves. It is as if each panel’s twist has been blown by the wind, a result of the kiln’s intense heat.

Like the mashrabiya, On the Bank of the Nile bridges sculptural and architectural space. The artist’s pattern language builds on—but does not copy—the historical sources of his study. Said is uninterested in re-creation and instead sees himself as a contemporary practitioner working within the long timeline of Islamic art.

Carving into the clay, the artist often uses a compass and ruler to incise his designs. These fractal-like overlays of deep green diamonds, circles, triangles, and squares meet and transform into running patterns of roundels and six- and eight-pointed stars. Said has inset the panels onto sculptural bases, whose wood marquetry patterns match their ceramic counterparts; to achieve this, the artist learned the art of marquetry, or wood inlay. Like all Islamic patterns, the artist’s designs have no beginning nor end. This limitlessness acts as a metaphor for the infinite universe and Said’s belief in the nature of Allah.

Although the mashrabiya’s enduring place in Islamic architecture was the artist’s initial inspiration, another site of influence emerged as the piece evolved. “In the beginning I wasn’t thinking about the Nile at all,” he says. “But the shape of the bases led me to think about boats, then sailing, which led me to the Nile.” (14) Often listening to the news from his Egyptian homeland while he worked, the artist found himself thinking of his youthful hours spent in quiet reflection as he sat watching boats on the Nile’s edge. The river is a vital resource for the region, and today, a site of struggle as Ethiopia builds a hydroelectric plant and mega-dam, which threatens to restrict its flow. (15) Fittingly, On the Bank of the Nile’s sail-like ceramic panels rest on wooden forms that suggest the hull of a boat, contoured into a pointed bow.

Like the light shown through Said’s carvings, the idea of place becomes visible by way of clay’s solidity and that which is revealed in its absence. Velarde invites the invisible voices of those who have come before her into the present. Hatch leaves room for the shadows of memory. It is notable that landscape, the traditional depiction of place, is not represented in Making Place Matter. Instead, the land is reflected in the clay itself as each artist has sought out their own internal place, mindful that the “outer shape of the clay is the extension of its center.” (16)

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(1) Tatum Lenberg, “23,000-Year-Old Human Footprints Discovered in America,” September 27, 2021. www. discovery.com/science/new-23-000-year-old-human-footprints-discovered-in-america. Accessed October 18, 2021.
(2) This discovery turns back the clock on human arrival to the territories that are now the United States by ten thousand years, to the ice age, twenty-three thousand years ago.
(3) Doreen Massey, “A Global Sense of Place” in T. S. Oakes and P. L. Price, eds., A Cultural Geography Reader, (Routledge, 2008): 262.
(4) Edward Casey, “Body, Self, and Landscape: A Geophilosophical Inquiry into the Place-World,” in P. Adams, S. Hoelscher, & K. Till, eds. Textures of Place: Exploring Humanist Geographies (University of Minnesota Press, 2001): 404.
(5) Bell hooks, Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (South End Press, 1999): 213.
(6) M.C. Richards, Centering: In Pottery, Poetry and the Person (Second Edition, Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1989): 34.
(7) Unless otherwise noted, all quoted text from Velarde via a conversation with the author with the artist on May 24, 2021 in Philadelphia, PA.
(8) Conversation with the artist, author and Jennifer Zwilling via zoom, January 12, 2022.
(9) For further information see James Doyle, Olmec Babies as Early Portraiture in the Americas, Metropolitan Museum of Art, www.metmuseumt.org/blogs/now-at-the-met/2015/olmec-babies.
(10) Molly Hatch, A Passion for China, September Publishing (2017)
(11) See Philadelphia Museum of Art, Plate 1796, philamuseum.org/collection/object/295954.
(12) Conversation between the author, Jennifer Zwilling, and the artist, May 21, 2021, Florence, MA.
(13) Email from Molly Hatch to the author, October 4, 2021.
(14) Conversation between the author, Jennifer Zwilling, and the artist via zoom, July 15, 2021.
(15) “Who Owns the Nile?” Middle East Policy Council, mepc.org/commentary/who-owns-nile, accessed January 15, 2022.
(16) M.C. Richards, Centering: In Pottery, Poetry and the Person (Second Edition, Middletown, Connecticut: Wes- leyan University Press, 1989): 34.