Featured image: Trying to Keep My Shit Together (While the World is Burning), 2020, Clay, glaze, 7 1/8 x 6 1/2 x 4 3/4 inches
LOS ANGELES––Kathy Butterly‘s Yellow Haze exhibition at Shoshana Wayne Gallery (22 January – 15 May 2021) features new works characterized by Butterly’s restrictive scale and painterly glaze experimentations. This latest body of work, made over the past 12 months of lockdown in her New York studio, pushes her practice in a new direction— slightly larger clay forms are in evidence, to give herself, Butterly says, “a bigger canvas with which to work.”
“I find a strength in the intimate,” she explains, “I find power in scale shifts within the works, I enjoy making works that are not rushed and demand a lot of skill and knowledge. The small scale is very demanding. I have a deep understanding and relationship with my materials and this skill allows me to work with passion and allow humor to flow. Beauty, humor, awkwardness are all important to me. Humor is a gateway to provoking deeper thoughts, tough thoughts.
I choose not to take up a lot of space with my artwork, to impose, but rather to engage the time and thinking of viewers. The works sort of demand you look at them and you take time to look at them —smaller forms pull you in and you spend a lot of time looking at them, they keep unraveling information. Environmentally I also do not want to create a large footprint, that is important to me as a world citizen.”
Explore more of Butterly’s works on Cfile.
Hi Garth and Mark,
Thank you for this lovely post of my work. X0, Kathy