Elissa Armstrong, blue, 2006

found ceramic figurine, polymer clay

7 x 9 x 6 1/2 inches; Courtesy of the artist

With a nod to the past and an eye toward the future, Elissa Armstrong makes fantastically transmogrified animal figures that allude to the sweetness and innocence of childhood yet also conjure up associations with the darker, more cynical world associated with adult experience. Her embellished ceramic and plaster bunnies, lambs, and deer acknowledge the long history of the decorative ceramic object—from 18th-century porcelain beasts and table services made for European royalty, to 19th- and 20th-century high art Staffordshire figurines and Hummel collectibles sold to the petite bourgeoisie, to kitschy contemporary knickknacks hawked in crafts stores and souvenir shops around the globe—while also subverting it in order to create something entirely new and reflective of the hybrid, often-outrageous world we live in today. In her alternately fairy-tale/nightmarish creations, Armstrong questions the conventional expectations of ceramics.

In addition to using found objects that have been purchased at garage sales or thrift stores, Armstrong press molds her earthenware figures from the types of commercial hobby molds that can be found at the local crafts superstore. These are radical moves for a ceramics artist who, like most in the field, has been well schooled in the techniques of throwing pots and inculcated with the prevailing attitude that the “best” or at least the most prized ceramic objects are unique and handmade by the artist. For Armstrong to disavow the notion of artistic “authenticity” by relying on commercially available molds of such saccharine, lowbrow subject matter goes against traditional ceramic doctrine. She further advances her subversive position by abstracting the figures and festooning them with thick, pooling, and garishly colored glazes and decidedly non-ceramic materials such as plaster, glitter, resin, and yarn. Through careful hand-modeled manipulation and sometimes extreme embellishment, Armstrong renders these once-representational animal figures into somewhat unrecognizable, fantastical creatures that are simultaneously illogical and familiar, frightening and comforting, repulsive and attractive.

Residing in the juncture between abstraction and representation, Armstrong’s sculptural objects resist easy categorization and defy previously held assumptions about decorative ceramics. These works inhabit a surreal world of make-believe, where everything is in a state of transition, where figures seem to be evolving (or perhaps devolving) from one form into another. Heightening this sensation are the more abstract, non-animal, stripped-down, and almost modernist works that Armstrong throws into the mix, such as all i want (2006) and new wish (2006). With their articulated appendages and almost erotic permutations, these objects suggest a primordial state of being, perhaps the fecund, geometric beginnings from which the larger, more developed images emerged. Or, on the other end of the spectrum, perhaps this is what they will eventually become? In either scenario, we see a connection between the cobalt linear extrusion of blue (2006) and the crimson appendage in all i want: linking them is a umbilical-cord-like line made from bake-able polymer clay (also known as “fimo” in hobby craft circles). And the relationship grows stronger once we view drifting (2006), a long-lost cousin to the deer in blue. But which one is more evolved? Which one is closer to reality? Those are the probing questions that Armstrong poses in her installation of nontraditional forms, especially when viewed as a group situated on a level plane, rather than as single, individual objects. Relationships are key.

The surreal world of becoming and unbecoming in which Armstrong’s objects play out their lives is strongly connected to the world of the grotesque, which is defined by its liminality and constant transformation of boundaries. It is shapeless and disarticulated, as is Armstrong’s work. It is within the loss of boundaries, the area of slippage, spillage, or seepage that the surreal grotesque is codified most succinctly, in what dissident Surrealist writer Georges Bataille defined as “informe,” or “formless,” which was the key to understanding the world.(1) In his essay “The Deviations of Nature,” an influential text in which he attempted to link anatomical monstrosity with the classical concept of beauty, Bataille began and ended his writing with a quotation from Pierre Boaistuau’s 1561 Histoires prodigieuses:

Among all things that can be contemplated under the concavity of the heavens, nothing is seen that arouses the human spirit more, that ravishes the sense more, that horrifies more, that provokes more terror or admiration to a greater extent among creatures than monsters, prodigies, and abominations through which we see the works of nature inverted, mutilated, and truncated.(2)

Armstrong’s creatures are a perfect example of how visually and conceptually intoxicating the grotesque can be—we are captivated by their beguiling cuteness, sweetness, or beauty, but at the same time we are repulsed by their abnormalities, deformations, or ugliness. And we cannot look away: they elicit within us that “frisson of debased delight that lies at the heart of convulsive beauty.”(3)

The grotesque, of course, has a long history in and of itself. The term comes from the word grotto, which etymologically derives from the 1480 excavation of Nero’s Domus Aurea and in which were discovered many drawings that combined human and animal anatomy with vegetation. Several artists were subsequently inspired by these drawings to create their own “grotesqueries,” including the master of Renaissance painting, Raphael.(4) With their human bodies morphing into plants and animals, these works suggested an alternate reality that defied the laws of logic and rules of nature, and which were also connected to ancient visions of chimera as well as the supernatural demons and creatures that adorned medieval churches. Anti-rational grotesqueries also later appeared in works of the Baroque and Rococo periods, in which flora and fauna were sometimes transformed into flamboyant or bizarre decorative elements in many media, where nature and reality were but starting points for aesthetic elaboration and experimentation. It is perhaps from these hybrid aberrations—from lion-headed sauce boats to an exotic menagerie all crafted in porcelain—that Armstrong’s works find their distant ancestors.(5)

While similarly occupying a place where reality and fantasy coexist, Armstrong’s works display a postmodern awareness of the past and a very contemporary irreverence toward what are deemed to be the appropriate materials, techniques, and subjects for ceramic art. The freeform abstraction of plaster, the gaudiness of glitter, and the sentimentality of childhood figurines all combine to push the boundaries of ceramics to their limits, and ultimately, transcend them. This boundlessness—a hallmark of the grotesque—speaks loudly for the possibilities yet to come, where the innocence of the past and the experience of the present find expressive innovation in the future.

Elizabeth Dunbar

Curator

Notes

1. Georges Bataille, “Informe,” in “Dictionnaire,” Documents 7 (December 1929). See Kirsten A. Hoving, “Convulsive Bodies: The Grotesque Anatomies of Surrealist Photography,” in Frances S. Connelly, ed. Modern Art and the Grotesque (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 226.

2. Georges Bataille, “The Deviations of Nature,” in Vision of Excess, Selected Writings, 1927–1939, ed. and trans. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 53.

3. Hoving, 239.

4. Maria Makela, “Grotesque Bodies: Weimar-Era Medicine and the Photomontages of Hannah Hoch,” in Connelly, 195.

5. Beginning in about 1728, Augustus the Strong, the elector of Saxony and king of Poland, ordered thousands of pieces of porcelain from the royal manufactory he had founded at Meissen in 1710. Native and foreign animals as well as a series of imaginary beasts were commissioned to create a porcelain menagerie for the king’s palaces. The ceramic collection had its origin in the royal tradition of maintaining a living menagerie to complement the specimens contained in a Naturalienkammer, or collection of curiosities. Predecessors of today’s natural history museums and zoos, the collections of exotic and native animals were viewed as microcosms of the universe and a symbol of royal enlightenment.

Born in 1972 in Kingston, Ontario, Elissa Armstrong currently lives and works in Lawrence, Kansas, where she is an assistant professor of ceramics at the University of Kansas. She received her MFA in ceramics from Alfred University in 2002 and her BFA in ceramics from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 2000. Her work has been shown recently in group exhibitions at the Salina Art Center, Salina, Kansas; the Spencer Museum of Art, Lawrence, Kansas; and the Schein-Joseph International Museum of Ceramic Art, Alfred, New York. This is Armstrong's first solo museum exhibition. She is a visiting artist at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art.