At the 25th annual
California Conference for the Advancement of Ceramic Arts (CCACA) I chose to
audit the lecture by Lisa Clague.
Lisa’s presentation was broken down to here four stages of inspiration:
the death of her college boyfriend, her first time experiencing psychedelic
mushrooms, the birth of her daughter, and the death of her father. While these were her 4 major sources of
inspiration, she demonstrated a wide variety of technical skills and knowledge
of both ceramic and metal mediums.
Clague’s early work was focused
mostly on illustrations due to the fact that she did not want to follow in her
parents’ footsteps (her father being a metal worker and her mother a
ceramicist). However in her
schooling she was forced to take a ceramics class where she made mostly pots. When it came time for her to do her BFA
show the medium she chose was clay.
From there her work transitioned into more human like forms following
her experience on psychedelic mushrooms.
She spoke of however since her trip, she has been able to lucid dream
and that has been the source of most of her work to follow. Human like figures with multiple heads
covered in animal masks became her focus.
And with the birth of her daughter the works became self-portraits of
the two of them. As her daughter
grew older Lisa began to pull inspiration from her toys. She would dip monkey sock puppets in
slip, then alter their forms creating creepy collage like works, one of her
works was an orgy of slip covered stuffed animals.
However she never strayed away from
her animal faced figures. She
showed examples of how she makes the human faces and the masks separately which
allowed her to use either doll eyes or taxidermy goat eyes. Her mastery of her material did not end
there as she showed slides of porcelain figurines found at the thrift store
that she had combined with the heads of Beanie Baby’s and dipped in slip to
create a singular piece. She even
began to take some of her older works and spray them down with hairspray and
rub graphite to give them a bronze appearance. However in her current works, she is shifting more towards using
clay and leaving all the other mediums out of her work. Due to the poor economy, she has been
making just the heads so she can make more and sell them at lower costs.
A master of many materials, Lisa
Clague’s talk about the evolution of her work and the techniques that got her
there was most defiantly a highlight of the 25th CCACA. Her work can be seen in person at the
John Natsoulas Center for the Arts in downtown Davis, CA.
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| Lisa Clague |
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