Marva Lee Pitchford Jolly
By Fred Camper
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Jolly’s “story pots” are rough, imperfect vessels as much as two feet high, decorated with figurative designs and often filled with intentional cracks. The designs recall the directness and simplicity of children’s drawings and of some outsider art, while the pots’ irregularities at first suggest a beginning ceramist. But they also evoke the organic integrity of nature, and the figures proceeding around them have some of the dignity of a classical frieze. Borrowing from many sources, Jolly creates works whose peculiar mix of energy and charm, of gentleness and force is unlike anything I’ve seen before. Their surfaces reflect her hand; though their designs seem traditional, in fact she’s blended influences to create a “tradition” entirely her own.
The cracks in Jolly’s pots, their rough edges, their often splotchy colors, and their frequently irregular designs–Graduation Day, for example, includes graffitilike lines that sometimes evoke buildings–startlingly integrate subject and form: it’s as if Jolly were equating the irregularities of handmade pots with those of the human figure. Her ceramic portrait heads, however, at first seem to celebrate individuality; the facial features in a piece like Jamesetta are precisely outlined, especially compared to the story-pot figures. These are not solid Western busts, however, but hollow ceramic faces, perhaps recalling tribal masks. And despite some differences in facial expression, individuals and their emotions are not the primary subject. Instead one notices the strange, long necks that act as bases and the flat clay surfaces that splay out from all sides of the head almost like the petals of a flower whose center is the face. Evoking both a tribal past and a connection to nature, Jolly reveals her view of human identity as tied to traditions, but traditions that she is herself inventing.
The images Maher collects and combines evoke the diversity and disconnectedness of our age: two pinup girls flank a Virgin-like figure in How Much Truth Can a Man Stand? but one has an unusual masculine-looking head, and the floral pattern on the Virgin’s ornate jeweled dress somehow blends in with a row of Chinese ideograms to her left. The Virgin’s face is featureless, pink, recalling for me the rocky landscapes of Italian Renaissance panel paintings, though actually it’s an illustration of a heart from an anatomical text. Calling his works “fictional icons” for “fictional religions,” Maher describes them as “artifacts of a culture that only exists in my head.” But like so many of his collages, this one seems to have faith at its core despite its pomo mannerisms. The Virgin is surrounded by a traditional gold halo, and once one realizes that her somewhat grotesque blank face is in fact a heart, the idea of an icon as an image that transcends its physical being is plain.
