whispering into the void

“Still, I wonder if we shall ever be put into songs or tales..”

Among the foremost contemporary American ceramists, Betty Woodman has been inventing and re-inventing new and traditional forms, producing exuberant, brightly colored, and witty ceramic works since the early 1950s.

Betty Woodman, who in 2006 became the first living female artist to be honored with a retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, has died at the age of 87 in early January 2018.

Woodman was born on May 14, 1930 in Norwalk, CT, and was the child of “free-thinking” second-generation Russian-Jewish immigrants. She “discovered” clay at the age of 16, while attending a pottery class in Newton, a suburb of Boston. “I loved it,” she recalled. “With clay, you make something out of nothing. It’s like magic”. She later studied art at Alfred University and married her husband, the painter then photographer George Woodman, in 1953. Their daughter was Francesca Woodman, the talented feminist photographer. She lived and worked between New York, NY and Antella, Italy.

She often worked with a deconstructed version of the traditional ceramic vessel, with her pieces ranging from site-specific murals to fragmentary columns and carpet-like floor pieces. “It makes good sense to use clay for pots, vases, pitchers, and platters, but I like to have things both ways,” she had explained. “I make things that could be functional, but I really want them to be considered works of art.”

Woodman is often associated with the beginning of a trend in the mid-1970s toward elevating traditionally low forms of art-making—ones that were not painting, sculpture, drawing, and printing—to the higher status of those other mediums. For Woodman, this was accomplished by radically experimenting with ceramics, while alluding to Italian Renaissance, ancient Etruscan, Sevres porcelains and Chinese styles, as well as evoking the works of Henri Matisse, Pierre Bonnard or Pablo Picasso.

For six decades, Woodman had strived to produce objects of exuberant, emphatic beauty, with little purpose beyond enriching the lives of those who encounter them. “A lot of art is made to raise your consciousness about the horrors of the world,” she said. “But that isn’t what I’m doing. Beauty is a very important part of my work. I want to seduce myself.”

Lisa Robertson | On Painting | Lisa Robertson’s Magenta Soul Whip