Thompson photo Peter Muniford.
but smooth, fossilized bone. The works
bear witness to the human impulse toward
conquest and exploitation, the ego-cen-
tered drive to capture and display, to turn
nature into a prize.
In spite of this mournful undercurrent,
the show is spiked with humor and clever
visual/verbal double entendres.
Fish Stick
is both of its title nouns and neither, a me-
ticulously crafted work of clay masquerad-
ing as a curved branch posing as an animate
creature.
Yogi With Begging Bowl
conflates
cartoon bear with Buddhist monk. Irwin
plays smartly with our habit of anthropo-
morphizing animals. A rabbit figure on a
pedestal (itself clay mimicking wood) has
vaguely human features and stands with
one front leg raised as if in greeting, like the
sustained wave of a politician. Mostly,
though, their bluntly flattened mouths give
these emissaries from the wild the discom-
fiting look of being silenced.
In a smaller selection of wall-mounted
tile grids with applied imagery, Irwin layers
the warm, sepia tones of old photographs
with the graphic punch of black-and-white
woodcuts. Here, too, in faux wood-grain
frames and references to both pure and
processed nature, he practices one marvel-
ous type of denaturing while lamenting
another. +
By Leah Oilman, a Sati Diego-based writer
for the
Los Angeles Times.
Сарру Thompson:
Dreamscapes—
Heaven and Earth
Traver Gallery
Tacoma,
WA
Oct. io - Nov. 8,2009
Cappy Thompson’s show marked a return,
after nearly a decade spent on large-scale
commissions, to works of a more intimate
scale, and the exploration of a new medium
that complements her repertoire of medi-
eval-style illumination. “Dreamscapes”
comprises vitreous enamel reverse-painted
on mouth-blown sheet glass, laminated to
brushed aluminum panels, and painted ce-
ramics on shard-shaped red tablets and plat-
ters. Noted for her use of ancient spiritual
and folkloric pictorial styles and allegorical
themes, Thompson draws upon narratives
and images from her personal life for the
glass works. But in ceramics, she turns to
themes deriving from early Christian and
Byzantine art.
The reflective brushed aluminum lends
a nocturnal aura befitting dreams to the glass
panel images. In
Dreamscape: Three Aspects
o f M y Soul,
a man and woman traverse a
narrow path before barren trees and a cres-
cent moon reflected on water—while leading
a donkey creature with gigantic dragonfly
wings. It seems a cross between the journey
to Bethlehem and modern-day pilgrimages
on the road of life (the man and woman re-
appear in
Pilgrims
and the domestic tableau
Couple').
This conflation of sacred and secu-
lar iconography as a dream motif is intro-
duced in various ways among the panels.
Moon Chariot,
for example, depicting an
embracing couple on a bed parallel to the
picture plane, may remind those familiar
with Romanesque sculpture of Gisleber-
tus’s almost comical scene of the three
sleeping Magi.
The humanism infusing Thompson’s
reveries in glass is replaced in the ceramics
by an almost strident style. The surface-
crowding feathered and haloed figures in
black-on-white glaze overlap in the manner
of Byzantine figural art, looking upward
and away. One can imagine these as frag-
ments of ancient frescoes lining a basilica
or a tomb. But even in Byzantium, human-
ism crept in. The clay pieces
Paloma
and
The Blessing
reveal the assimilating process
Thompson used to launch her themes and
images in painted glass. Learning from early
sacred art, she will assuredly move on to
develop her personal iconography in clay. +
By Ron Glowen, a writer and artist in
Arlington,
tV A .
Right:
Cappy Thompson
Dream o f the Rett D ance,
2008, vitreous enamel
reverse-painted on
mouth-blown sheet
glass, laminated to
brushed aluminum
panels, 20 x 29 in.
www.journal-plaza.net & www.freedowns.net
fcb/mario american craft 037
