Tracye Wear | From the Garden

An exhibition of recent sculpture by Tracye Wear. Wear is inspired by her combined interests in Cubist and early 20th Century sculpture with natural forms found in her garden.

“With her latest series, Tracye Wear pushes the scale limitations of the ceramic arts while reveling in the life-affirming forms of nature. Not thrown on a potter’s wheel, these contours are molded, shaped, and coil-built, but become organic beings. Decidedly of the hand, these vessels’ surfaces are smoothed and rounded yet often animated by the controlled indentations of human fingers.

Transferring her real-life skills with plants, soil, water, and sunlight from her home’s backyard, she enters a related studio terrain of pliable clay, moisture, the alchemy of glazes, and finally intense heat. By reenacting the mysteries of how vegetation sprouts and thrives as transformed by photosynthesis, Wear introduces a verdant vocabulary of seeds, tendrils, leaves, and blossoms to spiraling, bulbous, and seemingly pregnant vessels.

The artist resists the allure of boldly colored and glossy glazes, for the most part, instead seeking the subtleties inherent in transition and gradation. Her experimentation with the layer upon layer of colored glazes—when applied to protruding ribs and sinking recesses—embraces the chemical interactions and revelations that result from the extreme temperatures of high-firing. The transformative heat of the kiln itself provides a final chance interpretation of Wear’s otherwise intentioned deployment of palette and light.

Along the way, viewers may recognize allusions to the Venus of Willendorf, Hieronymous Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Tower of Babel, or the shadow and light of Dutch floral still lifes. At this exhibition, Wear invites us to wander—and to linger and wonder—in her secret garden, surreal but familiar, teeming with the affirmations of growth and transformation.” —Don Quaintance, Public Address Design