David Shaner
ASU Art Museum, Tempe, USA
This small but substantial retrospective at the Arizona State University Art Museum considers the ceramic art of David Shaner, a Montana-based potter who died in 2002. As both a functional potter and an abstract sculptor Shaner pushed the medium of clay into two different directions, unified by an attentiveness to natural materials that tells a 30-year story of the artist’s seduction by nature. Like Andy Goldsworthy or Edward Weston – whose photos proved a source of inspiration for the artist – Shaner’s work conveys a nearly fetishistic materiality, an obsession with geology and rock-based landscapes that provides the source materials for his craft.
In Montana, Shaner worked amid a peer group of potters who, like himself, came from elsewhere and settled in the West, adopting its quiet, rugged ethos through a back-to-the-land lifestyle embodied by huge parcels of property, hand-built wood kilns, and a distaste for university-based ceramics programmes, getting by on sales and personal grit. Anti-institutional but collectivist in spirit, Shaner was also closely involved with the ceramics-world version of an artist-run space, Archie Bray Foundation – a brickyard-turned-residency programme begun in the mid-1950s by Rudy Autio and Peter Voulkos, the legendary bad boys of postwar ceramics.
In a work such as Hanging Landscapes (1993), Shaner displays the vast range of his clay bodies: combinations of clays formed partly by nature, partly by years of combining minerals to produce strange and startling colour combinations, such metallic black and robin’s egg blue. Throughout the 1980s, Shaner produced a series of ceramic topographies. These comprise small, abstract sculptures – like Basin with Stone (1987) or Plateau (1989) – that depict facets of the land in bas-relief; smooth monochromatic surfaces that look something like Noguchi’s biomorphic shapes rendered in rugged earth-tones. Shaner’s constant nod to Modernism is evident in his purist approach to materials and his decidedly plainspoken, quietly original creations, such as abstract landscapes painted on plates (‘Landscape Plates’, c. 1984). Because what you see before firing is not at all what you get, Shaner mastered the alchemy of ceramics in a way that both celebrates and takes exception to the legacy of Modernist sculpture, though skewed through the cracked-mirror of craftsmanship.
Jenni Sorkin
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