British ceramicist Fiona Waterstreet is a maestro of tactile expression. Having spent her career developing an organic aesthetic, her ceramics convey a distinct humanism in the enduring trace of her hand found in each object. When Waterstreet first started working with clay at the Greenwich House Pottery Studio in New York nearly fourteen years ago, she was largely throwing on a wheel. Despite having no previous arts education, and ceramics being a largely ignored branch of the fine arts, she says that she fell in love with the tactility and uncertainty of working with clay. “The art thing started to seep into me,” Waterstreet remembers. She began creating more sculptural objects, bringing a form to life within her hands. Since first finding her artistic voice, Waterstreet has held solo exhibitions with Maya Frodeman Gallery, McClain Gallery of Houston, Texas, and the Drawing Room, East Hampton, New York.
Waterstreet enjoys the meditative process that begins in water and minerals and ends in anticipation as it transforms within a fiery kiln as she began making abstracted birds and forms from porcelain. Her bird forms are bulbous, elegant, and curious. The gentle tilt of the neck, the arch of the back, and the details of the beak: these works, more traditional to Waterstreet’s oeuvre, show her propensity for capturing the je ne sais quoi of the avian spirit in an organic, abstracted form. “Ceramics are a nut you have to crack,” says Waterstreet. “There’s an intrigue to it. Every time you open the kiln, you’re surprised.”
Waterstreet’s practice has more recently focused on the creation of vessels. Waterstreet has taken this universal object and pushed it out of simple functionality, and subsequently out of tradition. Many of Waterstreet’s vessels recall those from antiquity, with a subtle cracking to their glaze, caused by Waterstreet’s use of terra sigillata, an ancient Italian method of putting an ultra-refined slip on the clay that tends to crackle in the firing process. Meaning “earth seal,” terra sigillata was used by ancient Greeks and Romans to make vessels watertight, but Waterstreet experiments with terra sigillata to create surface texture and add color to her works. Other works are subtly carved with leaf motifs. This “drawing” on the surface of her vessels was a novel way for Waterstreet to imprint her organic aesthetic onto each piece, another way the viewer can see the perennial presence of Waterstreet’s hand.
Waterstreet’s high relief vessels, whose forms are abstracted and concealed by tangles of leaves, mimic the carvings and motifs of her other works. These works exude a similar air of antiquity as if they were pulled out of a long-forgotten country home enveloped in vines. Working through the abstraction of organic forms, she manages to retain the traditional essence of each object. “It’s the crux of what I do. I have a formality to myself, and I have a formality to my work, but it’s not interesting to me unless I can take it a bit further, unless I can bring abstraction in.” Building each vessel by hand, Waterstreet relishes in the process of distortion that follows. In working with organic forms and a feminine hand, she creates forms that embody elegance as much as they exude whimsy. As she has honed her distinct style over the past fourteen years, Waterstreet’s practice is one of experimentation, and by proxy, of transmutation. Born in England, Waterstreet moved to America in the early 1980s and currently lives and works in New York City.