Houston Center for Contemporary Craft
January 30 - May 8, 2021
Review for Momus by Laura August
Review by Sherry Cheng
Anna Mayer’s social and sculptural practice explores the impact of humanity throughout geologic time, with a focus on the temporal relationship between humans and the land beyond an individual’s life span. Her work in the exhibition reflects deeply upon the realities of death and decay. Drawing upon a language of mourning and burial practices, she uses materials like raw clay and porcelain dinnerware to communicate a narrative of what remains when people die and what is left for others to inherit. By grinding pieces of dinnerware she inherited and mixing the bits with raw clay to give it a new texture and purpose, she creates sculptures that appear to seep and bubble-up from the ground. These ceramic works are juxtaposed with a pair of bronze hands and feet that are cast from a composite of Mayer’s own body, along with the fingers and toes of others from communities in Los Angeles and Houston, where the artist has lived. By combining attributes from different people to form a new body, Mayer identifies a need for a society that relies on the collective strength of individuals…. [more writing about the show]
Ceramics + Geologic Time panel discussion
Conversation between Anna Mayer and James Watkins
Installation view. Background: Caribbean Petroleum Fire Near San Juan, Puerto Rico in 2009, 2021; printed fabric with holes created while crushing inherited dinnerware; 193 x 144 inches
Fireful of Fear: Store These Records in a Safe Deposit Box or Other Secure Place (Kanan Dume), 2008-2018; wild-fired ceramic; 20 x 16.5 W x 3 inches
In the foreground are three Fireful of Fear sculptures (2008-2018).
Background right: Coringa Drive on the Day the Woolsey Fire Started in 2018, 2021; printed fabric with holes created while crushing inherited dinnerware; 108 x 144 inches
Fireful of Fear: A Perfect Country Would Have More of Me (Escondido Canyon), 2008-2018; wild-fired ceramic; 20.5 x 16.5 W x 3.5 inches
Fireful of Fear postcards, 2009-2020; custom-printed postcards; each card is 4 x 6 inches
Installation of Mourning Ware sculptures, 2019-2021
[center] Mourning Ware (Layers), 2021; inherited crushed dinnerware embedded in purchased clay, layered with gleaned clays from Niland, CA and Houston, TX 11 in. x 10 in. diameter
Obvara Mourning Ware (Freestanding Funeral Fringe), 2020; inherited crushed dinnerware embedded in purchased clay, obvara-fired; cut up discarded inner tube; 18 in. diameter
Mourning Ware (Mount), 2020; inherited crushed dinnerware and Niland, CA clay embedded in purchased clay; 16 in. x 21 in. x 11 in.
Mourning Ware with Inner Tubes 2, 2020; inherited crushed dinnerware embedded in purchased clay; gleaned clays from Niland, CA and Houston, TX; discarded inner tubes and belts; 7 ft diameter
Seeping and Squandering (Earth Should Return - Houston), 2021; Mourning Ware Vessel with Seep Lip; Sculpey® model for an unrealized arm sculpture; ceramic sifters for sorting crushed inherited dinnerware; sweatsuit made of recreated Victorian era mourning wear print; artificial gardenia and leaves; roll of trash bags; shavings from the making of ceramic funeral fringe; Mourning Wear t-shirt design; framed discarded “melancholy” vinyl; custom-printed t-shirt with images of inherited dinnerware; stacked black and white garments worn by Mayer; “ghostware," made by pressing clay into various pieces of inherited dishware; Mourning Ware candle holders; black iDye packet; photograph of the Seep Field in Niland, CA with Hudson Ranch Energy Services geothermal plant in the background; photograph of a rectangular pit dug for firing ceramics in Houston, TX; photograph of a detail of a horse-drawn hearse at the National Museum of Funeral History, Houston, TX; photograph of swatches of Victorian "mourning prints”; teacups holding purchased clay; purchased mourning fabric including a "fire palette" tie-dyed t-shirt; digitally-printed samples of Victorian mourning wear patterns; discarded funeral fringe; photograph of clay volcano model; flecked canvas of Frederic Remington’s Bronco Buster bronze sculpture; discarded plastic; asphalt from a street in Houston; Mourning Ware Vessel with Teeth; Victorian woman in mourning wear
a project by Visitor Welcome Center, at Arm Gallery
Mourning Ware (Funeral Fringe), 2020
ceramic; purchased clay embedded with found clay surfaced by drought in Niland CA, cut up discarded inner tube
dimensions 2 x 4 x 1 inches
The Mourning Ware ceramics highlight the need of many to grieve, and how imperative it is that we make connections between personal losses and our damaged planet. Typically the pieces are inflected with fragments of crushed dinnerware that I inherited from my parents after they passed away. As I work with this crushed porcelain, it becomes flecks of dust that are scattered, embedded, dispersed, and blown away. These material properties reflect the ways in which behavioral and psychological patterns are passed from one generation to the next. The fringe for Arm Gallery is embedded with clay that has been brought to the surface of the earth as a by-product of global warming. The exogenetic nature of Mourning Ware emphasizes how fired ceramic can easily move back into the geologic record, perhaps even by passing through our bodies as dust.
A-B Projects, Los Angeles, CA
September 7 - 29, 2019
Featuring for the first time the Mourning Ware body of work, which explores relationships between personal, planetary, and historical protocols of grieving. Early references for this series include mourning rituals from the Victorian era—a time which witnessed the expansion and domination of the Industrial Revolution. These rituals involved women’s black mourning wear, which was gradually and progressively inflected with lighter patterns over periods of months or years as a means to mark and externalize a transition “through” grief. In Mayer’s exhibition, Seep Fields, discarded synthetic rubber inner tubes are shown in conjunction with a series of manganese-saturated ceramic mourning ware that are embedded with fragments of crushed “fine china” she inherited from her family. As Mayer works with this porcelain, it becomes flecks of dust that are scattered, embedded, dispersed, and blown away. Like ash, these tiny particles will never be completely obliterated. Their material properties reflect Mayer’s experience of mourning and the ways in which behavioral, psychological and environmental patterns are passed from one generation to the next. When it comes to mourning our dramatically changing climate, Mayer observes a distinct lack of public, visible protocol. She uses a sculptural investigation of her personal grief as a corollary to understanding and experiencing our global grief. For Mayer, the personal and the planetary are inextricably connected and one will always seep into the other.
On September 28, Mayer conducted the inaugural State of Ceramics discussion at A-B Projects. Mayer’s presentation and ensuing discussion focused upon the intersection of ceramics and grief, and embodied practices of making. Los Angeles-based artist Julia Haft-Candell introduced and moderated the discussion.
Adjunct Positions, Los Angeles
September 23 - November 10, 2018
For the exhibition, Mayer presents new sculptures in ceramic, plaster, steel, and fire. With special attention to the unique architecture of Adjunct Positions, where two exhibition spaces are stacked on top of each other, Admit, Emit highlights the various ways in which Mayer produces heat--from within her own body and through sculpture and ceramic processes. The gallery's structure frames Mayer's ongoing engagement with burial practices and the excavation of consciousness.
Mayer has produced two portable kiln sculptures for the gallery's garage. Their decorative patterns bring together Victorian mourning practices and present-day destruction by fire. Vessels that house creation and incineration, each kiln is artwork and tool. Keeping them company are photographic self portraits that reveal Mayer's movement between dull(ed) and flush(ed). Her overt self display is with a high degree of vulgarity. She insists on limelight. Her grief reflects losses local and global.
We are devastated by heat. It obliterates. She steams. Emit.
Two branched ceramic sculptures from Mayer's Utteruent series will be fired in the kilns and then covered with lime plaster inside and out. At the conclusion of the show they will be buried on site. The lime will intensify the alkaline Southern California soil, effectively preventing any growth in the garden above the sculptures indefinitely. If life gives you lime, make nothing!
AWHRHWAR, Los Angeles
February 15 - March 10, 2018
Review by Georgia Lassner
As I Say Dying emerges from Mayer’s consideration of archaeologic practices of collection and circulation. Intrigued by the academic who hoards “finds” indefinitely in above-ground storage, Mayer’s sculptural practice exists in the shadow cast by these excesses, while still driven by her embodied experience of every day strife. The central works of the AWHRHWAR exhibition are two sets of replicas of funerary urns that Mayer made in 2017 for family members. She remakes the urns at different scales, each set honoring decisions made in intense grief. The vessels’ variations reflect that they’ve been hand-crafted at different times and through the fog of consciousness.
Joining the replicas in the gallery are hooked rugs from Mayer’s Pale Clay series, made using knitting patterns generated by Mayer’s mother. Their imagery is pulled from various works by Paul Klee, her mother’s favorite painter. Additionally, the inclusion of a networked text + ceramic sculpture (Utteruent -1, 2018) provides an example of how language functions to excavate and bury, and can, at times, allow us to rise, raise, raze, and realize. Produced by compression and then fire, the branched, extruded channels in turn shape what passes through them. Language takes that same shape forming the walls themselves. Words sink up.
collaboration with Laura Aldridge for Glasgow International
April 4 - 21, 2015
A series of events held in Glasgow between April 4-21, 2014. Three large-scale sculptures resulting from the gatherings were exhibited at Trongate 103, Glasgow. Working from a shared interest in analogue firing techniques, we designed and built a portable ceramics kiln out of oil barrels welded together. The 'double barrel double downdraft kiln' was the focus of three themed firing events in Glasgow and existed as a dreamy, 'twin-derkammer' vessel-sculpture mirroring the two artists who came together to make it. With performative and ceramic contributions from local artists and practitioners, the public gatherings were both ritualistic and casual, and served as a way for the temporary community of the arts festival to engage with larger cross-sections of the city.
Openaries I: Thought forms/Theories of the universe (uttered rather than written) / John Baldessari
- The Hidden Gardens, Tramway
Openaries II : Vaginas and snakes -
Glasgow Sculpture Studios
Openaries III: Ever open openings/Ever more open openings/The expanded vessel
- Woodlands Community Garden
Commissioned by Glasgow International and supported by Outset Scotland, with additional support from Glasgow Life.