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BAY AREA EMERGING ARTIST JUST Jane Burton's 20-foot Pit-Fired Sculptures to be Featured at Bedford Art Site
Featuring a series of large-scaled, 4' to 20', hand-built ceramic sculptures that explore the vessel as a container shaped by the life within, the Bedford show is titled Stories Left Behind. "I'm intrigued with objects that hold life," Burton said in commenting on her show, "the shell of the hermit crab, the cocoon of the butterfly, the human body. Over the layers of time, they hold the story of the life that resides within. The vessels remain as life moves on, leaving their stories behind." She created the largest of the pieces, the 20' Above It All specifically for the space. "The stairs at the Dean Lesher Art Center go up four flights and wrap around an area that begs for a large piece. Prior to this, my tallest piece was only 8 feet," Burton explained. "My studio has a low ceiling, and my kiln is just 28" deep, so I built the piece in sections, loosely following a pattern I had drawn out. I didn't even see it all together until after the work was fired and ready to install." While challenging to create, Burton finds these larger pieces fulfilling as an artist. "In my large-scale pieces, I work in stages usually on more than one at a time. The initial stages are like the beginning of relationship, dealing with surface issues and structural problems, technical and conceptual issues. As they grow and become closer to my height, my relationship with them changes, becoming highly personal, even intimate. And as they tower above me, I feel the respect and power of a spiritual being in my presence." Burton's passion for ceramics was ignited six years ago when she enrolled in a pit-firing class at Ghost Ranch, New Mexico. There, she learned the "Native American way" of digging the clay, working it with er feet, forming a 4" coil pot, burnishing the pot with a polish rock at several stages during the drying process and finally firing it in a pit of wood and cow dung. When she returned home to Walnut Creek, she immersed herself in classes and workshops at the Civic Arts Education studio. "It wasn't long before I pushed my husband's motorcycles out of the garage," she laughs, "filling it with kilns and building a studio in the lower level of my home." Her earliest work focused around the traditional vessel form. Later, under the direction of Andrée Thompson and Susannah Israel, Burton studied figurative sculpture and incorporated her coil building techniques as she continued in a sculptural direction. Her work remains indicative of the vessel form as she represents the human body as a vessel, leaving the heads open at the top. The unpredictability of pit and smoke firing add to Burton's excitement in the creative process. "I'm fully immersed in the performance from the time I first dig my fingers into the clay until I pull the vessel from the fire's ashes. I achieve the depth of texture and color through a fusion of clay slips and washes, layers of organic and inorganic materials, copper markers and tape as well as non-ceramic finishes, such as gold leaf. The surface marks on the vessels are softened and altered by the smoke. Her recent work has includes the use of Terra Sigillata - fine clay particles suspended in water - for a soft polished glow. Burton's show in the Bedford Gallery Art Site opens along with Pots: Objects of Virtue, a National Juried Exhibition of Pots in the main gallery with a reception on Wednesday, June 1 from 5:30 to 7:30PM, and will remain on view through August 21, 2005. ####
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