Flame Throwers

About

Artists Shannon Goff and Roxanne Jacksonaddress handmade sculpture with a vigorous building of clay, fired to ceramic with lustrous glazing yet at war with more traditional approaches. Jackson and Goff fuse two levels of visual structure: above the horizon and below. They each wield weapons, like fire, to merge the two into powerful ceramic objects.

Jackson centers the object firmly, like a mineral once stuck and removed from the geology of an alien plateau. “Her macabre works are black-humored investigations of the links between transformation, myth, and kitsch.” She explains. There is a comfortable emotional shift from the Alienware series of Jackson’s work: representational heads of 'beasts' are flayed and opened in a process that deconstructs the original image(s); the result leads to creatures or mineral formations opening as if caught in a psychedelic, biological dissection of the underworld's secrets.  Her protruding ‘mystical’ elements stab the atmosphere from the palms of paws, like an offering to its celestial creator. Nails, fur, candles, crystals, gold chains and dice are reminiscent of an urbane plateau, earthly, physical and profane albeit a suggested irreverence for self-imposed sacred symbols of contemporary occultism.

Contrarily, Goff’s balanced abstractions build a contained calm, breaking rules of gravity, and enacting the false unease of their own strength. The torrid structure implies entanglement, within a collapsing landscape. The imaginary landscapes assemble as gestural drawings in space, testing the conceptual and structural limitations of the material. “I work on the edge of chaos and the beneficial space of failure...gravity is a constant tutor.” She explains. The entangled line often begins innocently, like a doodle in its purest form. The negative space inside Goff’s sculptures feels equal to the positive space. The delicacy of her work goes against the weight of the material, making them feel light, airy, and ungrounded, not so common for an earthly and permanent material of clay, then glazed and carefully fired. As if painting a Japanese landscape, lines lift upward, suggesting the presence of the atmosphere.

The Flamethrowers’ sculptures synchronize with craft in a pure form yet blaze a path for a reinvention and disruption of historic ceramic sculpture. Their keen ability to combine both the celestial and terrestrial from their interpretation of the horizon, as ‘above and below’, sacred and profane, proves their conceptual tenacity. These artists share a sculptural practice that highlights a subversive and at times transgressive one; both thwarting a conventional expectation of the ceramics tradition.