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Fiona Waterstreet
Vessels -
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. Vessels, her second solo exhibition with Maya Frodeman Gallery, presents fifteen recent ceramic works and five drawings that exemplify Waterstreet’s winsome coalescence of hand-building and drawing.
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. Waterstreet enjoyed 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. “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.” Since then, Waterstreet has also held solo exhibitions with McClain Gallery of Houston, Texas, and the Drawing Room, East Hampton, New York.
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Her newest body of work includes pieces that nod to her earlier practice. One such piece is the stoneware bowl, which was the only work in the exhibition created on a potter’s wheel. Despite this, the bowl finds affinity in her recent work through the expressive, sweeping brushstrokes that dance across its surface. Vessels also includes a set of two small bird forms, 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.
Vessels marks a watershed in Waterstreet’s practice in her ability to go bigger through hand-building, as one monumental vessel stands nearly three feet tall. It was also an exercise of taking the universal form of a vessel and pushing it out of simple functionality, and 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 experimented 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. The exhibition brings these works together with her realist pencil drawings. Many of these works were done in 2020, when Waterstreet, isolated and without her kiln, began drawing portraits of all the people she could not see in person at the time. Her more pastoral location, away from the hustle and bustle of the Soho loft home and studio she shares with her husband, artist John Alexander, inspired her to create studies of bird nests and leaves that later inspired her most recent ceramics.
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VESSELS: FIONA WATERSTREET
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