Brian Christensen has been spending a great deal of time—and craft—creating ceramic works that look like chunks of rock, the kind you might find littering the Utah landscape. He spends hours building this illusion: forming the mass, carving striations, staining the surface with mineral-like hues. And then, he pokes a hole in it. Literally.
In Petrified, Christensen’s exhibition at the Salt Lake City Public Library, organized in conjunction with the NCECA conference and continuing through April 25, the ancient rhythms of geology meet the expressive potential of clay. The show plays with the boundary between natural object and sculptural artifact, turning the illusion of permanence into a site of conceptual inquiry. A professor at Brigham Young University, Christensen has long been interested in material transformation and layered meaning. In Petrified, he draws direct parallels between clay’s mutable states and the geological forces that shape Utah’s mountainous terrain. His sculptures resemble weathered shale, black limestone, rust-colored sandstone — and yet they are not rocks. Closer inspection reveals circular apertures, intentional patinas, and slightly uncanny details that betray the artist’s hand.
In “Rock Vessel,” Christensen mimics the black limestone of his backyard, the Wasatch Range, complete with the chalky white patina that forms through lime accretion. The surface is convincingly natural, the work appears as if lifted from a canyon wall, bearing the authority of deep time. And yet…embedded in the side is a cavity that feels both functional and mysterious. The concentric ridges draw the eye inward, implying a hidden depth or a point of entry into the sculpture’s imagined history.
A similar circular element appears in a second work, a precariously balanced stack of reddish-brown forms streaked with green patina, evoking oxidized copper or ancient bronze. What makes this piece particularly striking is the play of tension and stability. The stacked elements feel like they’re in the process of settling or shifting—an echo of tectonic movement or the slow collapse of eroded stone formations. There’s a sense of time frozen in mid-motion. That ambiguity—between stability and collapse, object and artifact, nature and artifice—is key to the emotional power of the work. It feels like a ruin — the weathered remains of some ceremonial structure — caught mid-collapse or mid-formation.
Both sculptures feature this embedded cavity, this hole. A third work in Christensen’s practice, not on view here but tellingly titled “Crude Tap,” suggests a possible interpretation. The word tap implies access—to oil, memory, emotion—while crude underscores the rough, invasive nature of that access. It’s hard not to think of Utah’s oil shale deposits and the machinery that pierces seemingly untouched landscapes. If you’ve traveled the state enough, you’ve seen it: wild, remote terrain suddenly punctuated by the industrial apparatus of extraction.
The third work on view at the library features two fractured ceramic forms, each with rounded protrusions on one half and matching concave voids on the other—like puzzle pieces or a mold and its cast. The forms seem on the verge of reunion or as if they were freshly separated. It’s a quiet, poetic meditation on rupture and potential repair. Materially, the piece again demonstrates Christensen’s mastery over clay’s transformative qualities. The surface is convincingly rock-like, with rich layers of grays and dark earth tones, subtle striations, and weathered textures that evoke the passage of time, that suggest formation by centuries rather than kiln-fired weeks ago. This piece, like the others, fuses tactile immediacy with conceptual subtlety.
Across this body of work, Christensen plays with scale, illusion and metaphor. His sculptures don’t merely imitate rocks—they suggest what rocks might remember. They invite us to think about pressure and transformation, about the layers of time embedded in material, and about the tools—literal or symbolic—we use to reach into the past.
Petrified, Salt Lake City Library (4th Floor), Salt Lake City, through April 25.
All images courtesy of the author.
The founder of Artists of Utah and editor of its online magazine, 15 Bytes, Shawn Rossiter has undergraduate degrees in English, French and Italian Literature and studied Comparative Literature in graduate school before pursuing a career in art.
Categories: Exhibition Reviews | Visual Arts
After the antiquarians and pseudo-druids and conspiracy theorists had their turns with the mystery of Stonehenge, when the archeologists finally took over, one of the first things that impressed them were these locating pegs and matching holes that aligned the lintels on the trilithons, the set of three stones—two upright and one across the top—that held them together in alignment. They immediately recognized these as mortise-and-tenon joints, characteristic of and all but universal in woodworking. So the builders of Stonehenge were recognized as having learned how to build in wood before they moved on to stone. Later, evidence like postholes were found that confirmed the existence of long-gone wooden structures in the same area. Brian Christensen and Shawn Rossiter provide wonderful explorations of these mysterious, historical footnotes, first in clay and then in words.