For some ceramists, the clay tile is the most mutable canvas, inviting metaphorical tensions and historical resonance in its function as both workaday material and fine ornamentation.
For artist Cary Esser, it also invites a brush with infinity.
A trip to Turkey brought Esser face-to-face with the cobalt and turquoise Iznik tiles adorning 15th century mosques. Although each tile was an individual marvel of careful color and brilliant design, together, they pooled into an altar to the infinite. Their cool-glazed surfaces flowed with liquid homogeneity; their stylized decorations of flowers and vines snaked across the tile borders, erasing boundaries as they twisted into a harmonious whole.
When Esser returned to her studio, she treated these tiles as a point of departure for her own explorations with spare spirituality in design. Although the artist has experimented with architectural forms, levels, and spatial arrangements in her work, the near-uniform panels of her Chromophilia Veils intensify her focus on color, glazing, and the intimate, nonverbal responses that the most elemental symbols can inspire.
The seven panels—separated into series of four and three to highlight patterning and positioning—are embellished with simple onion domes, hourglasses, and shields. Many of these symbols are invoked indirectly, as Esser’s glaze traces their partial, almost imperceptible contours. Cobalt pigment swims down the surface of the tile, washing away—blurring, veiling—definition. The symbols are most often left open, bottomless, capable of containing the infinite beneath their gauze-fine veils.
For Esser, the shield holds particular significance. While a form of protection for the body, it also serves as a source of identification (family crests, tribal affiliations, royal or religious signifiers): the shield can both protect us and expose us. The veil likewise serves as perforated protection, offering us a delusive sense of privacy. We peer at the world through a transparent mask; we too easily forget it can peer back.
The deep histories and layered connotations of these symbols invite both considered reflection and visceral, emotional responses. Their weight feels just right for Esser, whose work is less conceptually driven and more a spontaneous dialogue with materials and process. The seven panels in Chromophilia Veils 1 and 2 provide a showcase for how identical materials can respond dynamically to the influences—both deliberate and accidental—of artist and environment.
Although Esser uses the same glaze on each veil, it reacts with a mercurial temperament. In one panel, it forms crystals soft and fine as fiber; in another, it sparkles gently, like snow beneath a streetlamp. The color of the clay beneath the glaze alters the effect as well. Red clay pulls our focus earthward, to the corporeal world; white clay elevates our gaze to the realm of the divine.
Whether in her strikingly glazed Veils or gentle, slip-cast Parfleches, Esser approaches clay with almost scientific curiosity and receptivity. Where scientists control variables, she controls casts and materials; where scientists tease out hypotheses, she works on “hunches.” The process requires curiosity, patience, and a tolerance for surprise. “Every time I’m in a kiln, it’s excitement or disappointment,” Esser says.
The allure of her tiles and sculptures suggests the result is more often serendipitous.
– Liz Cook