Wayfinding at Craft Contemporary

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Sam Shoemaker, Sand Pump (installation view) (2022). Craft Contemporary, Los Angeles, 2023. Image courtesy of the artist and Craft Contemporary, Los Angeles. Photo: Ian Byers-Gamber.

Long, long before Peter Voulkos and other California-based artists exploded conventional understandings of clay, humans used the material to negotiate their coordinates in time and space. Ancient Egyptian mythology, for instance, held that the god Khnum fashioned human babies from clay before placing them in their mother’s womb. This pattern appears in a multitude of creation stories: The first humans are fashioned from earth and water by a creator, maybe dried in the sun, and then animated with life. In Craft Contemporary’s third clay biennial, aptly titled Wayfinding, contentious dialogues pitting art against craft are left behind in favor of more primal concerns: Here, clay is presented as a material point of connection between humans, ancestors, and land, tapping into existential questions around lineage and survival.

Installed across the museum’s three floors, the works on view range from large-scale floor and wall-mounted installations to diminutive tabletop sculptures. Unlike the two previous clay biennials held at the museum, in this iteration, every participating artist lives and works in California, a curatorial choice underlining the show’s focus on connection to place. And, while concern and care for the natural world are undoubtedly present in the exhibition, what emerges is the assertion of clay as a powerful medium for reconsidering the human cosmological position. If the white male god complex of extractive colonial capitalism has led humanity astray from our terrestrial context, the works in Wayfinding suggest that perhaps, like the creators in our legends, we might mix earth and water to help rebuild connections to land and lineage in a process of co-creation, not dominance.

Many of Wayfinding’s artists find significance in this centering of collaboration over control, either by using clay to channel spiritual and ancestral connections or engaging directly with other living organisms. The latter approach is most readily apparent in five medium-sized sculptures by artist and mycologist Sam Shoemaker. Within these ceramic structures, Shoemaker has expertly cultivated varieties of real-life reishi mushrooms (Ganoderma lingzhi) that grow upwards and outwards. Tony Hawk Pro Skater (2022), the most architectonic of the works, bears a strong resemblance to the stacked, softly-edged rectangles, staggered windows, and protruding supports of a Hopi adobe house. Glistening shoots of reishi grow from its “roof,” “windows,” and other orifices, prompting open-ended questions about authorship, coexistence, and unknown outcomes. It’s hard to tell if Shoemaker, his ceramic structure, or the mushroom itself is most in control of the final composition.

One of Wayfinding’s most captivating series is by Lizette Hernández, comprising seven wall-mounted abstractions that are roughly symmetrical and hung side-by-side at eye level. Each work builds off of a flat slab construction, erupting into dimensional ruffles and folds that curl around their central flat planes of clay. Pressed by fingers in configurations shaped like rib cages, some are pierced to the wall with small steel nails in similar vertebral columns. Each has been Raku fired, a process with roots in ancient Japan; in the Western version of this method, works are removed from the kiln while still hot, surrounded by flammable, organic material like sawdust, and repeatedly starved of oxygen. The resulting surface effects are unpredictable, with colors ranging from deep blue to copper and gold, all speckled with metallic luminosity. The firing method gives each piece the feeling of being burnt, magical, and alive—making each feel like an indestructible relic of Earth itself. By relinquishing control of her creative process, Hernández engages not only with her material but with Earth’s own natural “logic,” a wild collaboration between artist and nature.

If Shoemaker and Hernández are in direct dialogue with the unpredictability of organic processes, a multitude of Wayfinding’s artists use clay as a way of simultaneously speaking to—and with—land and ancestral inheritance. Paz G uses the surface of their vessels as emotionally charged sketchbooks. Bearing drawings, portraits, and handwritten text in English and Spanish, the works collectively memorialize the artist’s ancestors and land of origin, Chile.

La Sangre Roja Del Copihue (2020), is a handbuilt matte black glazed form with three protruding handles that features a portrait of the artist’s grandmother and the text “Maria Ines Jacques / El poder de intención,” or “the power of intention.” Playing with the idea of the container, this vessel serves to “carry” the memory of the artist’s ancestor into the present. In this way, G invokes their grandmother as a collaborator in both the most specific and broadest senses: first as a person who literally created the conditions of the artist’s existence, and secondly as a presence who is materially and spiritually integral to the work itself.

Wayfinding asserts clay as not only a relevant medium in contemporary art but perhaps the one best suited to addressing intersections of identity and ecology, themes that have emerged as increasingly vital cultural touchstones within contemporary art in recent years. The process of working with clay involves direct interaction with the elements of life—earth and water—and, as one of the most ancient modes of expression, it is already in implicit dialogue with humankind’s origins. Alternately dismissed throughout Western art history as utilitarian, decorative, “too earthy,” or simply not of-the-moment, clay seems to have been right here waiting for an audience ready to talk—without any coyness or sheen of irony—about human belonging on Earth as a process of co-creation among the land, the living, and the lives before us. What feels most exciting is the suggestion that we cannot talk about clay without talking about the very stuff of life: earth and water, yes, but also our origins, myths, memories, and the ongoing collaborative process of survival.

This review was originally published in Carla issue 33.

Paz G, Secretos De Familia (installation view) (2019). Ceramic and glaze. Craft Contemporary, Los Angeles, 2023. Image courtesy of the artist and Craft Contemporary, Los Angeles. Photo: Ian Byers-Gamber.

Courtney Mattison, Our Changing Seas IV (2016–19). Glazed stoneware and porcelain. Image courtesy of the artist and Craft Contemporary, Los Angeles. Photo: Ian Byers-Gamber.

Lizette Hernández, Wayfinding (installation view) (2023). Image courtesy of the artist and Craft Contemporary, Los Angeles. Photo: Ian Byers-Gamber.

Wayfinding (installation view) (2023). Image courtesy of the artists and Craft Contemporary, Los Angeles. Photo: Ian Byers-Gamber.

Rachel Elizabeth Jones is an artist and writer in Los Angeles. She is a co-editor of Tele- and runs the art space Flower Head from her garage. She has contributed to the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Brooklyn Rail, and The New Inquiry, among other publications.

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