Installation view of “Permanence of Earth” at the Shaw Gallery on the campus of Weber State University. Image by Geoff Wichert.

Under the right circumstances, the entrance to an exhibition can be a portal to another reality. With good art, though, that strange land will soon reveal itself to be the one the audience sought briefly to escape, only transformed.

Eugene Ofori Agyei, one of ten ceramic sculptors being presented by the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts in Permanence of Earth, at the Mary Elizabeth Dee Shaw Gallery at Weber State, has captured that experience in “Complex Journey 1.” Here, an enormous flock of small creatures, each perhaps the size of a child’s fist, seems to descend the wall by the gallery’s grand doors and, having reached the floor, spreads out as if to merge with the new arrivals in what will become at least a shared tour, and perhaps even a new awareness. “Complex” may refer to the many forces that uproot us today, some in search of pleasure or knowledge, but too many concerned with survival: the hunt for a safe place, or the search for a new identity, or a place that could foster one. Thus the overarching theme of the many objects within is announced here, at the start.

The ten artists have each contributed between one and six sculptures, for a total of 34. Each contribution constitutes a body of similar, indeed closely-related works with a theme and influences included in a statement that can be found near the entrance.

Installation view of Eugene Ofori Agyei’s “Complex Journey I.” Image by Geoff Wichert.

Lydia C. Thompson calls each of her sizable, yet discernibly ramshackle constructions an abode: two “Hollow Abodes,” a “Waterfall Abode,” and “Breathe: a White Abode.” They have in common the invocation of a board-built structure with a loose, fancifully elaborate plan. They’re as rough within as they are without, and she means them to engage barely conscious memories in the minds of their builders, but viewers will decide for themselves whether they give away their real origins or those recollected from stories, fables, myths or imagination. Thompson particularly considers the way nature edits or customizes the individual life—the “three moves is as good as a fire” ethos—but as a cultural rather than a local, transitory fact.

Natalia Arbelaez does one of the many things that can be done in Spanish but not in English. In her standing figure, “La Creadora,” she presents the Creator as female. To be sure, English has its “goddess,” but that has more to do with desire than the entity who made everything. The stories Arbelaez illustrates here are about Isabella, the triumphant first queen of Spain, and her daughter, Juana, who was called Mad but became Spain’s second queen. What these two Europeans have to do with a Colombian artist should not require too much thought: Isabella’s sponsorship of Columbus set in motion events that leave Arbalaez not only a person of mixed history (there being no such thing as “race”) but an American of damaged status: citizen of a country whose legitimacy is dismissed by a powerfully venal nation to the North. One conflict she has resolved is to use terra cotta, the rich red clay in these figures and a mainstay of Colombian crafts that in the past was routinely disguised behind alien techniques like Majolica glaze.

Natalia Arbelaez, “Juana La Loca.” Image by Geoff Wichert.

Jessica L. Sanders, “Tiny Square Shape No. 5.” Image by Shawn Rossiter.

Clay may be the most malleable medium in art. Not only that, it can simultaneously show the marks and pressures of the artist’s own hand: her will in action. Once fired, it’s permanent, as this show’s title foregrounds. It’s also a common people’s material, and symbolizes their permanence on the land. Lest it be taken for a sign that everything has a place and belongs in it, however, consider Jessica L. Sanders, whose long hours of forming and elaborately decorating clay finally produces the last thing anyone expects: fabrics. Her interest is personal, rather than political—though of course the personal eventually becomes political. But in Sanders’ case, there are philosophical questions she seeks to answer, such as how static, permanent, vitrified material becomes fluid, active, and involved. Setting aside Scissors, how does the Rock become Paper? While she denies seeing these as quilts, she feels a continuity through time with everyone who works with textiles.

Some sculptors divide their ranks between those who work on the wall and others whose work stands on the floor or pedestal. The formers’ efforts are generally viewed from the front, the others can be seen from all sides. While the artists in Permanence of Earth don’t entirely support this thesis, two of the more prolific include one of each. Courtney Mattison’s “Surface Tension” series includes striking and colorful bas reliefs, each of which is both unconventionally large and made to seem even larger by the representations that cover them: tiny subjects that she has magnified many times over until they seem to leap off the wall. In fact, they’re examples of marine life, particularly organisms that live on reefs and turn them into stunning gardens. They seem familiar and outsized probably because we’ve seen them in aquariums, videos, and countless photographs, though there will be the fortunate few who have seen the survivors on the remaining reefs. Sadly, Mattison is celebrating what she knows to be the victims of global warming, which has bleached and killed many miles of the ocean’s spectacular environments. She emphasizes that calcium carbonate, one of the components of potter’s glazes, is also used by reef-building organisms to build the skeletons that support so much vividly colorful life. It may well be that one day such clay copies will be all that’s left to see.

Courtney Mattison, “Surface Tension 13”

Standing on pedestals before these marine visions, viewers will find half a dozen of Linda Nguyen Lopez’s abstractions, each identified as a variety of “Dust Furry.” These are but one example of the rich lives she asserts our inanimate possessions have while in our homes and workplaces. The stories Lopez tells herself, and others through her art, are apparently filled with anecdotes and humorous examples through which the “Dust Furry” explains how the things we expect to wait passively where we put them somehow get into adventures and troubles we can only imagine.

One of the glories of clay is the astonishing verisimilitude it’s capable of, which can be every bit as effective in small objects meant to sit on shelves or be held in the hand. Erin Furimsky fashions her clay into hand-and-eye satisfying, rounded forms that she experimentally covers with fragments of familiar-seeming decoration, which she meticulously inscribes onto their swelling surfaces and then paints. Intriguing, organic as though grown, surreal at times, they are the kind of thing that when seen invite touch, then can be returned to the shelf to await the next encounter.

In Matt Mitros’s “Mug Compositions,” hand-built parts are “pressed” into service with ones that are extruded, 3-D printed, or otherwise mechanically made. Functional parts like the mugs work together with purely ornamental elements nearby. Non-ceramics such as artificial grass are worked in to provide yet more contrast: divergences that extend to their goals, Does this technique originate in the pursuit of survival, or mere efficiency? He stresses the differences, but his aesthetic goal, and the challenge he sets for himself, is to try to unify the objects that result: a task in which he succeeds subliminally.

Installation view of “Permanence of Earth” with works (from left) by Eugene Ofori Agyei, Matt Mitro, Salvador Jiménez-Florez, Erin Furimsky, Linda Nguyen Lopez, Erin Furimsky and Lydia Thompson. Image by Geoff Wichert.

With so many artists using their arts to span gaps in their lives, whether between diverse and often hostile cultures, or human desires and nature, or between a personal identity and its public encounters, or even between the potential of a medium they know well and an audience that’s been misinformed about it for so long, it’s easy to see ten metaphorical self-portraits in Permanence of Earth. But for a medium that has produced many of the greatest portraits in art history, ceramics has produced relatively few actual self-portraits. California’s Robert Arneson (1930-1992) was an exception, having expanded the accepted size and meaning of what clay can accomplish in a long career that included many self-portraits, and arguably culminated in his brilliant and fierce memorial, “George,” which was the only official response to the murders of George Moscone and Harvey Milk that measured up. Arneson is an icon to Salvador Jiménez-Florez, whose masks here concern the double consciousness that forms around being “the other.” His masks require the viewer to understand that the mask isn’t just a woven, disposable cover, but becomes another identity of the wearer that is indispensable with what lies beneath. Why else would a single mask possess two tongues, at once symbolic of paired languages and personalities? What makes these seemingly familiar folk objects new is the way they confront the world beyond the pedestal with more than just historical facts. Here we find ID with an attitude: one that is lively, playful, and serious at the same time.

Andréa Keys Connell, “Topsy Turvey”

In a way, every large exhibition is like a group performance, and as such could have an overseer: a ringmaster or judge to watch and comment for an audience too well trained to respond candidly. Andréa Keys Connell provides such an observer, which Shaw’s Exhibitions Manager Camela Corcoran and the excellent gallery staff have appropriately placed high in a corner with an excellent view. In reality, though, Andréa Keys Connell’s “Topsy Turvey” addresses the universal experience of loss and the human instinct to rise above and return to work with wisdom and, as seen here, good humor.

NCECA 2025: Permanence of Earth, Mary Elizabeth Dee Shaw Gallery, Weber State University Campus, Ogden, through March 29.

All images courtesy of the author.

Geoff Wichert

Geoff Wichert objects to the term critic. He would rather be thought of as a advocate on behalf of those he writes about.