BREADFRUIT (`ULU), 2016-2024
Breadfruit, 2019. Glazed ceramic. Photo: Daniel Greer
Breadfruit, 2023. Glazed ceramic. Photo: Daniel Terna
Breadfruit, 2023. Glazed ceramic. Photo: Daniel Terna
`Ulu (Breadfruit), 2024. Glazed ceramic. Photo: Etienne Frossard
`Ulu (Breadfruit), 2024. Glazed ceramic. Photo: Etienne Frossard
`Ulu (Breadfruit), 2024. Glazed ceramic. Photo: Etienne Frossard
Detroit Art Week, Young Curators, New Ideas V, July 16-21, 2019, Detroit, MI
Fergus McCaffrey, Barbarian Days, March 11 - June 31, 2021, St. Barth
Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Gathering, June 24 - July 30, 2023, New York, NY
NADA Miami 2023, Curated Spotlight, Someday Gallery, NY
Maui Arts & Cultural Center, Altered Earth, August 27-October 19, 2024, Kahului, HI
Press:
Artsy, “5 Artists on our Radar,” Jordan Huelskamp and Artsy Editorial, January 2024
My ceramics practice connects me with Hawai`i, the place where I was born and raised, though I now live a continent and an ocean apart. Ceramics is widely appreciated in the islands, and I was first exposed to it through my mother who taught ceramics at a public school in Honolulu. As a young person learning about art, I gravitated toward the physical properties of the medium and its hybrid, Pacific-centric influences spanning East Asia, Polynesia, and the West Coast.
In 2016, I returned to working with clay after a 20-year hiatus. The reintroduction came through the summer ceramics program at Alfred University, and when I returned to my graduate work in the MFA program at Hunter College that fall, I began developing large-scale installations with clay as a primary medium. During that time, I created 300 castings of breadfruits. I pressed and shaped malleable clay inside the mold so that each fruit suggested a different stage of ripeness or decay, with each one appearing unique. They evoked the cyclicity of the natural world while also alluding to the human body. My large-scale installations from 2016-2018 foregrounded my research into the imperial botanical history of breadfruit and the wider environmental impacts and colonial legacies that interconnect the Pacific and Caribbean. [These installations include Botanical Cage and Perimeter Wall (2018), Southern Oceans (2018), and Botany Is Ancestry (2017).] Breadfruit (`ulu in the Hawaiian language) is an indigenous plant of Melanesia and Polynesia, yet it has complex stories linking it to the Caribbean. I was looking at environments which have been altered through extraction and exploitation. Since I was living and working on the East Coast, I felt compelled to interweave Pacific and Atlantic histories, and to locate myself within this complexity.
As my practice evolved, I sometimes returned to creating the breadfruit ceramics, and I began to wonder if viewers might feel what I feel when I am making these forms. As I work, my thoughts reside with land, place, and home. The abstract layers of glaze color suggest aerial views of breaking waves, reefs, coastlines, islands, and the flow of lava, as well as the detailed textures of soil and water. Each breadfruit had metamorphosed into its own world. `Ulu is deeply symbolic for people in Hawai`i. Two Hawaiian proverbs, Hālau Lahaina, malu i ka `ulu (“Lahaina is like a large house shaded by breadfruit trees”) and Lahaina, i ka malu ‘ulu o Lele (“Lahaina, in the shade of the breadfruit trees of Lele”) speak to bonds of love and care. [These ʻōlelo noʻeau (Native Hawaiian proverbs and poetic sayings) were collected and translated by Mary Kawena Pukui.] Following patterns of environmental desecration in the Caribbean and other tropical regions, much of Hawai`i’s verdant and fertile land was put to waste in service of sugar, tourism, and excessive development. It was suggested to me that viewers in Hawai`i might see the `ulu ceramic form as a symbol of restoring and replanting the earth, especially post-fire. Each would evoke our planet, fragile and life-giving.
Notes on glaze color:
Color is a matter of chemistry. Additional factors such as the clay body, thickness and method of glaze application, dimensionality of the surface (convex, concave, flat, smooth, or textured), and internal kiln atmosphere significantly impact the color and appearance of the glaze. Commercially manufactured glazes (which I use) are typically designed for white stoneware or the application of a single glaze color. I take a different approach: I layer two different glaze colors over each other, in multiple applications and in different pairs, combinations, and shapes across each piece. I use clay that resembles iron-rich soil and lava – earth tones of red and brown that are familiar to me from the landscape of Hawai`i. With this approach all bets are off: the chemical formula of the glazes are changed by layering different ones together, and the high iron content of earthenware (such as terra cotta) chemically interacts with glazes in unexpected ways. Additionally, my use of semi-transparent glazes often reveals the clay color underneath – it is not unlike starting a painting over traditional umber, or a bright orange, or another stain of color instead of white gesso. Glaze is a composition of metal oxides and chemical compounds – in its unfired state it appears chalky, with no resemblance to its final color. I must imagine the final outcome entirely, remembering that white will be blue, mauve will be metallic, gray will be emerald, etc. I try to maintain a visual idea of how vibrant the form will be, with a spectrum of color effects and value shifts, despite its appearance as a grayish snowball before firing. It is a time-consuming process: each day I average two pieces at most, since glazes must be applied in multiple stages, and each layer must dry before the next is applied. Previously, without access to small test kilns and working with other constraints, I relied on chance occurrences and the magical and surprising (or disappointing) results of randomly combined glazes. The failure rate was very high. Eventually, I created hundreds of glaze test tiles showing layered effects on specific clay bodies. Despite these tests, there is a lot of unpredictability at play on each piece, as the layered glazes travel over the rounded and textured surface. Although I have access only to electric kilns which do not generate atmospheric effects (such as the wood fired kilns, salt kilns, soda kilns, gas fired kilns, and various chambered and sloping kilns used by artists I admire), I still appreciate my dance partner: edges of painted areas bleed, drip, run, and collide in the heat. I do my best to achieve magic with painterly gesture, layered color, and strong shape to evoke the landscapes in my mind.