Charles Simonds

Charles Simonds: Sculpture with Clay

Charles Simonds majored in art at the University of California at Berkeley and after graduation, taught college art in New Jersey. There he discovered an area of clay pits that had once provided the raw material for some of Manhattan’s older buildings. He literally immersed himself in the subject, burying himself naked in a pool of wet clay to get a feel for the material. Back in New York, where he still lives, he experimented with clay and sand, learning to capture the look of the American Southwest or an African savanna.

Simonds’s sculptures are mostly enchanting miniature architecture and landscapes with small chambers and towers; some are abstract organic shapes, bulbous or phallic in form. Indoors, his sculptures are protected from immediate destruction, but permanence is not what his work is about.

The enduring value of his work – the art of it – comes across in the stories he tells and in the stories others tell about him. Like Robert Smithson, a friend and artist he respected, he embraces entropy. He builds his objects (at least his early work) for destruction, and he takes no measures to insure their survival. He said in the 1980s, “Their effect is enhanced by their destruction and disappearance.”

Beth Cavener Stichter

Beth Cavener Stichter, “A Rush of Blood to the Head”, Clay

Clay sculptor, Beth Cavener Stichter has a unique approach to the artistic expression of the emotional human experience, through animals. Titled “A Rush of Blood to the Head,” the title of a Coldplay song, her sculpture depicts two male goats standing on their hind legs, their mouths locked in a passionate embrace.

“I select animal subjects since the animal body is removed just enough from my own to establish a distance, yet the personal relationship is irresistible. Here, I become far enough away from myself to unravel questions previously tangled in a self-conscious quagmire.”

Her creatures seem to embody the same consequences as humans, yet they are cloaked in animal skin. “Beneath they are experiencing the impacts of aggression, territorial desires, isolation, pack mentality … I want to pry at those uncomfortable, awkward edges between animal and human.”

Javier Marin

Sculptures by Javier Marin

Javier Marín was born in Uruapan, Michoacan, Mexico in 1962. He studied at San Carlos, the National Academy of Art, in Mexico City and has exhibited widely throughout Mexico with solo exhibitions at the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo, MARCO in Monterrey, and the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City. Marin has been featured in over thirty solo exhibitions and participated in more that one hundred domestic and international exhibitions including the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain.

Working quickly, primarily in clay, Javier Marín does not refer to a model but instead relies on his remarkable knowledge of the human form gathered from years of drawing directly from the figure. Process is one of the artist’s most obvious passions, spikes of bronze are often left exposed to show the paths of molten metal flowing into the cast figure. During the creation of a work, words might be quickly inscribed onto the raw clay, holes gouged and support structures left exposed.