Lara Odell

I work with both functional and sculptural ceramics, often overlapping the histories and purposes of both, and creating hybrid pieces that call into question what constitutes function in ceramics.

My work is rooted in the disciplines of craft, design and painting. How do these languages fit into, and work against (functional) ceramics? I’ve always identified as an experimental artist, and threads of humor and absurdity often run through my work as well.

I use a range of clays and firing temperatures: from porcelain to white and red stonewares. I’ll often draw a cut a line into the pot with a knife. Pulling apart the piece at the seam, I then reattach it, creating a puzzle-piece like inversion of positive and negative space. I use matte glazes and wax resist to block off sections of exposed clay, abstracting the form visually. Seen from different angles, the pieces appear flat or full: perception of objects in space is questioned. My approach is the converse of what painters typically do, which is to imply volume on a flat plane.

Formally, my pots respond to the geometric patterns found in the concrete of freeways, swimming pools, and other architecture of southern California, but also the vegetation, weather patterns, environmental touchstones such as fault lines, and direct sunlight that creates delineated shadows and color blocks all around. Conceptually, my cut-and-repair method might resonate with notions of trauma and healing, impermanence and failure, collapse and repair, and how emotional and physical scars manifest by being hidden, altered, or exaggerated.

My functional work sometimes takes the pots’ sculptural expressions further while still retaining their functional use as conventional pottery. Appendages detach and re-attach to the pot. These pots and their off-spring suggest the idea of growths, geometric puzzle pieces in the form of shelves or hooks with removable pieces that fit neatly into those spaces. The idea suggests the extension of ideas or materials—I like to think of it as resonating with the idea of overcompensating for something lacking, or hidden.

The pieces are a nod to instability and impermanence, the potential for change over time: imagine a piece one can both drink out of and take apart, like a fidget toy. The body and mind dynamic. This idea morphed into “pocket sculptures,” geometrically inspired miniatures to go in one’s pocket, arrange on a tabletop or hide in a landscape. Some pieces are stand-alone shapes; others come with stands; and still others are flat like tiles, with interlocking pieces. These little ceramics appeal intimately to the senses—like functional pottery, their scale is for the hand, to be held. I want to expand what function is and how it plays out in our daily lives. In other words, we know how utilitarian work functions, but how does sculpture function? What is a “personal” sculpture? I like to imagine that these pieces hover in the space between functionality and sculpture, to question why pottery is something that is made to be handled, while clay sculpture is (usually) not.

I also invoke humor into my work by experimenting with other things clay can do—how it can act as a canvas for drawing, pretend to be something it isn’t, or become a visual record of its own making. Clay lends itself to mimicry: it can record impressions or become a stand-in for something else. For me, it makes sense to explore the trompe-l’oiel genre with decoys of handheld quotidian objects like cigarettes, Q-Tips, and pencils—like a still-life, but 3D. Something comes out of the painting and into the room. Is it real?

The drooping, elongated and interlocking cigarettes have further evolved into possessing anthropomorphic qualities and speak to notions of thwarted growth, addiction, overcompensation and maladaptive behavior, but also animated humor.

Recently I took my Cones with Fault Lines and Puzzle Sculptures to Joshua Tree State Park. I’m talking about the idea of how fault lines play out in the literal sense in geography, but also figuratively in the body, and am investigating notions of camouflage with my ceramics in both rural and urban settings.