Art | Galen Olmsted’s Angel Shit

Galen Olmsted is a sculptor and installation artist working on the edge of ceramic practice. He is best known for creating large quantities of biomorphic tubular and ball-like forms in porcelain, which he calls “Angel Shit.” Olmsted specifically chose porcelain to explore ideas of formlessness and entropy and to destabilize “porcelain’s exalted status as a pure material.” In Olmsted’s solo show Angel Shit at the John Erickson Museum of Art (May – June 2012), the work was exhibited in his signature scatter style, the piles reminiscent of wreckage or accumulated cast-offs. Art critic Jenni Davidson writes, “Galen Olmsted’s subverts porcelain’s pure and white associations and re-interprets it as the dross of the Earth’s surface.”

Angel Shit explores unexpected possibilities in the materiality of porcelain. Olmsted states:

I make an analogous relationship between the ceramic extruder device and the sphincter, dragging the conventional notion of porcelain as pure down to porcelain as stain, as base material. My installations draw connections not from an obvious transposition of recognizable objects, rather I am interested in the formal results and the conceptual implications of the operation of the extruder, an industrial device that squeezes the porcelain into consistent tubular forms.

Taking down porcelain a rung isn’t enough; Olmsted is after bigger game. In a sidelong way he equates art, along with other human endeavors, to defecation: whether that be by-product, a biological imperative, or a revolting substance, or all three:

To imply industry is to imply that which it makes: shit. My flattenings, the crumpled thin slabs of clay, operate as a more pointed attack at the conventions ceramic sculpture and volume. They lay flattened by gravity—deflated, pathetic, and low—the implosions of white modernist space.

Olmsted installed another scatter porcelain piece of his, Bones, along a creek that ran behind his old apartment. “I had originally planned on moving it after critiques,” Olmsted wrote:

… (But) after some thought and sudden laziness, it was left to succumb to the elements. Perhaps a week went by before a representative of the university ‘physical plant’ department confronted me. With authority endorsed by law, my installation had been declared an illegal dump. I was ordered to remove my litter. The powerful enforcers threatened me with a nasty fine as well as time in jail, were I not to clear the trash within 48 hours. What serendipity! My project had been officially declared both illegal and garbage! How could I have possibly come closer to literal rubbish without actually incorporating it in the work? Ironically, the site was already and still is a cesspool of drainage which gathers used tampons, beer bottles, Styrofoam, architectural boogers from past demolitions – I even found an old engine block half-buried– condoms and an alligator. I decided to bury everything in the sand.

Born in 1982, Olmsted graduated from Western Kentucky University in 2009. In 2012, he completed his MFA in ceramics from the University of Florida’s School of Art and Art History. Olmsted has also been a teaching assistant for undergraduate classes and a coordinator for the WARPhaus Gallery in Gainesville, Florida. Olmsted will be an artist-in-residence at Art Center West in Roswell, Georgia until 2014. Olmsted’s work has been reviewed in Culture24, View TV Belfast and Culture Northern Ireland.

Image above: Galen Olmsted installing his porcelain Angel Shit.

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