Tanks
photo Lynn Ruck.
Radar
The Experience
of Place
All her life Meredith Brickell
has been sensitive to her sur-
roundings. “For me, the thread
that connects my work is obser-
vations of place,” she says. Her
early backdrops were pastoral—
the New Jersey farm she grew
up on, the prairies of Nebraska,
where she attended college.
When she moved her studio
to an industrial neighborhood
in downtown Raleigh,
N C ,
“my
thinking shifted. The urban
landscape has been a new source
of inspiration, even though it
is a very different aesthetic,”
she says. “For a long time, I was
only interested in beautiful,
isolated, rural spaces. But I am
increasingly interested in the
complexity of imperfect land-
scapes. They might not be as
‘beautiful,’ but I appreciate the
many interconnected layers
that make up these places—peo-
ple, architecture, urban plan-
ning, abandoned sites.”
In her ceramic and mixed-
media sculpture, Brickell ex-
presses the experience of place
in visceral, intuitive ways,
through subtle, minimal use
of form, line and color.
Tanks
©,
a simple arrangement of rustic
vessels elevated on scaffolding,
stirs sensations associated with
pools of water—depth, floating,
stillness. “These containers
articulate emptiness, while si-
multaneously creating a land-
scape of tangible objects,” she
explains. The lone, tiny win-
dow in her Raleigh studio in-
spired
Ground View,
a series of
pastel drawings on plaster pan-
els, offering fragments of a city
skyline, glimpsed as if in periph-
eral vision or darkness. Last
year Brickell took part in a col-
laborative project at the Water-
shed Center for the Ceramic
Arts in Maine that dealt with
the concept of place; she and
fellow artists created an installa-
tion out of found objects gath-
ered on the property (but, in
a nod to Watershed’s proximity
to rivers, lakes and ocean, only
things that were blue).
Personal space is the theme
of
Bones Q ,
an array of small,
mysterious earthenware arti-
facts laid out on the floor as if
for inventory. “This collection
refers to the realm of the hand-
held-tools, toys, found objects,
the things we carry with us,”
says Brickell, who conceived
the piece following the deaths
of two of her grandparents.
“The arrangement emulates
the process of sorting through
personal items when moving,
or culling and redistributing
possessions after someone dies.
These ceramic forms represent
a memory of an object, rather
than the actual object itself.
They’re ambiguous, and they
exist in a murky space between
the familiar and unfamiliar.”
Brickell and her husband,
furniture designer Ray Duffey,
recently moved to Indianapolis,
where she has a stimulating new
job teaching art at DePauw Uni-
versity. “I love the interdisci-
plinary dialogues that happen,”
she says of the liberal-arts aca-
demic environment—how an
archaeology class, for example,
will visit her ceramics studio.
One can’t help but wonder what
visions this new ambience will
inspire in her art.—j .l .
mbrickell.com
Hot Spots
On View
Gallery shows, listed A -Z by
state. View complete calendar:
americancraftmag.org
CA / Los Angeles
Fowler Museum
at UCLA
N ick Cave: Meet Me
at the Center o f the Earth
to May 30
fowler.ucla.edu
Found-object garments styled
to make sounds when worn.
CA / San Francisco
San Francisco Museum
ofCraft+Design
Designers on Jewelry: 12
Tiars o f Jewelry Production
by Chi hapaura.
.. ?
to May 16
sfmcd.org
Imaginative jewelry, including
pieces from the Chi ha paura.
.. ?
Foundation, founded by the
Dutch jeweler Gijs Bakker.
DC /Washington
National Building Museum
28th Annual Smithsonian
Craft Show
Apr. 22-25
smithsoniancraftshow.org
A showcase of handmade wares
by gifted American artists.
apr/may 10 american craft on
