In December 2021, just as the Omicron variant was beginning to creep through New York City, I set up my sculptures, drawings and lamps inside a ground-level gallery on 324 fifth ave. Granted to me by the non-profit Chashama, the space was in mid-town Manhattan, a block from the Empire State Building; between a Panera Bread and a CVS. Nobody asked me to do it, but Iâd built up a body of work and felt it was time. In ceramic studios in Brooklyn, North Carolina, Colorado and then Brooklyn again, I had made, and thus accrued, sculptures from clay. Little landscapes like rock and bone, long wavy ones with soft shifts in shape like clouds, tall spindly structures, abstractions of trees, looping form like hills. I had also made lamps: their bulbs held within cubic forms with openings like shutters and latticework, others whose light reflected of a surface to gradate like a sunset or peer out like light on a mountainâs edge. Clipped from my sketchbook and now hanging along one wall were the drawings, many of which Iâd made outside my studio, on Saturdays or while on vacation. In several, dashes of ink pen accrued into veils of shimmering leaves. In others sparse marks denoted a womanâs face, a bending road. Two of the drawings were dark with ink strokes, composing, through variations in density, night landscapes, interspersed with dots of light like stars and wavy openings like clouds or creases in fabric. On 324 fifth avenue these works sat on tables and hung on walls, ever so often to be regarded by some visitor who had come through the doors. For the most part I, too, sat in silence, glancing up every so often from my book to bodies gliding past the glass façade: first in sunlight, then as silhouettes against neon logos and street lamps at night.
On the desk where I sat Iâd placed a stack of exhibition statements. As the days passed, hands pulled from the pile, and ten sheets became a single one which I guarded. In time, creases appeared on the page. Dots from moisture wrinkled; edges began to curl. Printed were the words Kate Butler and ECHOâS ANSWER, and below that a paragraph in which I attempted to thread together the disparate works under the single title. Occasionally and with cynicism Iâd think of the statement as an epitaph: an end point, although not a permanent one. It wouldnât be long before this collection of things I made would exit the gallery and, as it was my hope, disperse into the homes of different buyers. They would depart the ensemble, leave the gravitational forcefield of the story I had told about them. The statement might stay on my website indefinitely, but it was only temporarily a functional document.
The story I told concerned my relationship to my mediums: how I used them, and what for. In one line I compared them to the walls of a canyon: âphysical planes against which the human voice finds its place within the immensity of nature.â I spoke of paper and clay as resonant surfaces, reflecting and transforming the energy I brought to them by way of my hands. I compared my artworks to echoes. An echo was like an impression â Â what art historian Richard Shiff called âa phenomenon of nature and the artistâs own beingâ â but different, describing an event that takes place outside in open space rather than in the mind. The echo also invoked transience, that reality of life on earth that I felt compelled to reckon with through drawing and sculpture, despite and because of their stillness.
It shouldnât have come as a surprise and yet it did: that the vehicle for this body of work, the gallery show, was subject to the very passing of time that Iâd felt I was assuaging by building static, physical forms. In the hours sitting at that desk, nursing my desperation, I thought with envy about whoever built those Roman monuments, whoever carved those ancient cathedral façades. I envied the physical permanence of these formats, but more than that their participation in rituals for which the gaze of the individual passer-by was incidental. Ancient Egyptians made paintings in tombs that were never intended to be viewed by hundreds of people from Art History textbooks: they were rather meant to shepherd and sustain the deceased into the next life. Archaic Greek artisans carved figures like the Kore and Koroi, male and female youths not for display but devotion: honoring, at gravesites and temples, departed souls as well as beings never subjected to the vagaries of time. Even that statue of Marcus Aurelius â his hand outstretched, horseâs leg forever about to crest down â seemed to appeal not to the people mulling about the Piazza del Campidiglio but to a profounder, more omniscient gaze: the gaze of history, or that of God.
We still have monuments and graveyards, churches and civic buildings. Art, though, is by and large defined these days by its independence from any ideology beyond the artistâs personal belief system; from any agreed upon social function beyond to be looked at in a gallery, and then sold. The best art is beholden to nothing but the artistâs individual capacity for revelation. And so to make art requires faith in oneâs own vision; faith in what can be discovered through making and looking. Faith, that the act or vision realized â for me on a sheet of paper or in hard, fired clay â is a reward enough for oneâs efforts. Faith that each otherâs attention is enough.
This freedom can feel a bit like loneliness. Â












