Installation view of Clay Arts Utah at the Salt Palace Convention Center.

NCECA appears to have taken over every available meter of Utah exhibition space in order to accompany Formation, their 2025 annual conference. The only venues they appear to have missed were those belonging to organizations, like the Nora Eccles Harrison MoA, that have their own invaluable ceramic art collections showing instead. If this sounds like a complaint, I can only reply that I’ve been waiting for about 50 years to see clay get this richly-deserved and long overdue attention.

As Formation approaches its climax, however, events have begun to come so close together in time that there’s a danger of missing something important. The promised environmental show, which has more to do with the technology of acquiring materials, the use of energy for firing clay, and even the underlying ergonomics of gathering for an international conference, acquired a last-minute aesthetic surge from the inclusion of its witty poster image of an ornamental toilet (except for that gold one, they’re all made of clay) that moved its message to the front of the line. But what about some other shows, the ones NCECA designated to fill the small exhibition halls in the Salt Palace during the actual conference? The ones where the covetable beauties we’ve been staring at since at least January are finally for sale? We at 15 Bytes felt we ought to take a look at those as well.

Proceeding from the main entrance, it takes a bit of faith to keep following the signs, which are plentiful and accurate, but seem to lead on and on through the labyrinthine convention center, to the northwest corner where the small halls are clustered. The first one, Rooms 257 A-B, houses Clay Arts Utah, about as comprehensive a showing of the subject as might be expected given the demands of so many hungry venues, and which was assembled by Dawn Atkin, whose own work demonstrates a winning combination of both originality and strong design. “Comprehensive” has a particular meaning here, since the display includes a spiral-centered platter by Joe Bennion, a stalwart figure in Utah arts who is currently fighting for his livelihood and reputation against a “Satanic Panic” attack all the way from Florida. Joe’s platter asks “Tell me what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life …” The answer that audibly surrounds it here would clearly be some variation on “Get Muddy.”

Installation view of Clay Arts Utah at the Salt Palace Convention Center.

Other works in a gallery full of things it’s good to see again include Maryann Webster’s “Shallow End of the Gene Pool II,” in which a visibly evolving fish prepares to join an incredulous snake on land, and a personal favorite, the nature studies of Jason Walker, whose remarkably precise graphics make the most of the parchment-like surface of porcelain.

The only mini-exhibition being neglected by the crowds was the paradoxical—meaning both promising and forbidding—“One Certainty” in 258. Assembled by Claire McCauley, whose community-building efforts are paralleled by the niche community of furry creatures she fashions from clay, this small, selective assembly explores the generally uncomfortable subject of death. Favorites would include Sarah Conti’s “American Bittern Canonic Jars,” which refer to the Egyptian process of mummification and the threatened wetlands of North America in jars that foreground the long, sinuous necks of the birds while using their beaks to ensure an accurate closure, as well as Amelia Rosenberg’s “At the End of the Day,” in which a pair of bats, shrouded in their own wings as bats do, lie among candles and sprays of tiny flowers.

Time pressures prevented exploring the densely-packed roomful of students’ works, about which one observation: all of the works were smaller than the average size in the surrounding rooms, while none were as small as some gemlike, tiny teapots next door, meant to showcase the intricate skills of their makers.

One of the most intriguing elements in the Juried Functional Teapot III extravaganza in 260B is Hamish Jackson’s large selection of tea cups, which were both for sale and for use by those who found themselves susceptible to thirst while looking over the tables groaning with teapots of every imaginable (and unimaginable) description. Jackson’s explanation of how he compiled the precise clay, including minerals unique to Utah, is alone worth the trouble of slipping between the crowds lost in examining and touching (yes, you can touch them, and will want to) the teapots. The only bad news is that a purchased teapot will have to remain in the show until it closes.

Conferences visitors admire and carefully handle functional teapots at NCECA’s conference at the Salt Palace Convention Center.

The final room, 260 A, contains the satisfyingly exotic Formation Under The Big Sky: Wild Clay and Material Research At Montana State University, organized by Josh DeWeese and Jeremy Hatch. This program, which began in 1940 and is still going strong, includes a footnote that is worth promoting to the top of the page: a pot used for testing glazes by Peter Voulkos. For the uninitiated, Voulkos was the functionally-trained potter who broke out of traditional limits and inspired more than one generation of artists with his expression-rich ceramics. It’s not an exaggeration to say that without him, neither clay—nor glass-art—would be anything like what they became in the years that overlapped with his career.

Stepping back some from the masculine energy of the abstract expressionists in whose number Volkos came to be included, Jeremy Hatch offers “Fragile Masculinity,” which reminds the absent-minded that in mortal bodies, like with porcelain (which breaks before it bends) inflexibility does not equal toughness. This shift in emphasis from the aesthetic to the material will be welcome to anyone who finds their taste flagging under the impact of so much opulence. For while there is need to elevate Creation as we find it, to find or make beauty as an antidote for all the ugliness we can’t seem to stop producing, there is still a nobility in natural processes and their results that cannot be denied. Rose Schreiber’s “Future of the Cage” may be daunting, but there is order emerging from its chaos that’s worth taking note of: a wild beauty, to paraphrase this show’s title.

And what’s next, for those asking, as someone always does when an end, such as this conference’s, is in sight, “What’s next for clay?” Most of the crafts media that emerged in the 1980s as arts in their own right—glass, wood, metalsmithing, and so forth—soon found their champions. Two that arguably did not were ceramics and textiles. Clay has obviously found a more demotic voice and with that better choice has arrived auspiciously. Contemplating the materials in Wild Clay, including Danielle O’Malley’s “The Grid” and Amy Edler’s “Upheaval” and “The Strength of a Stitch,” is it too much to hope that textiles, surely as fundamental a human activity as ceramics, will also have its day?

Installation view of Formation Under The Big Sky: Wild Clay and Material Research At Montana State University.

Clay Arts Utah, One Certainty, Formation Under the Big Sky: Wild Clay, One Certainty, & Juried Functional Teapot III, Salt Palace Convention Center through March 28.

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.