October 2, 1994
Cover Story; Where Clay Meets Imagination; by Christine Hamm
Clay Exhibit at the Stone Gallery in Concord
Taken together, the show represents a breakthrough for group members whose interest in pottery has grown beyond the utilitarian pots, mugs and vases normally associated with clay work. While all of the potters on display also produce functional pieces, the show has given them a reason to cultivate the art for art’s sake side of their craft.
“Ceramic sculpture is sort of an orphan child”, says Haynes, Stone Gallery owner. “People who are coming from a sculptural tradition don’t see it as sculpture and those coming from a ceramic tradition are frequently looking for uniformity, consistency and repeatability. None of us is even trying to do that. Everything here is one of a kind.”
The phrase “happy accident”, is one that Haynes uses frequently to describe the inspiration for much of the work on display. When Auburn resident Deirdre Cleary slaps her clay against the wall to begin the process of forming the unearthly faces that haunt her lustily colored creations, she never knows what kinds of folds, stretches and marks will result. “What ever happens, happens” Cleary said. “I go with the flow, and that dictates what form a particular piece will take.”
Derry
News
Friday, October 14, 1994
Living/Arts
by Anna Santos
Dee Cleary has tried painting,
silk screening, and photography, but none of those media gave her the fulfillment
she receives from throwing thin pieces of clay against the wall. Slab work
is how she describes her technique of throwing thin layers of clay
on the wall. The wall creates unique folds and stretch marks which she
then works with to create unique faces and images.
“It has that certain touch
of immediacy, you can see it happening before your eyes, it is three dimensional
and it has more of an earthly feeling,” Cleary says, expaining why she
loves clay over other types of art media she has tried.
She likes experimenting
with different types of faces in her clay work, forming images that would
have an immediate impact on the viewer and have an element of surprise.
A simple but unique half-sphere could have a surprose image of a face inside
when turned upside down. She also likes making things that make noise inside,
and often her works will rattle when picked up.
“Al Jaeger in particular
has influenced me because he pushes creativity, encourages individual experimentation
and there are no wrongs with him,”says Cleary.
The 36 year old is also
part of a creativity group which consists of 15 people specializing in
different mediums of art. She also serves as the chair of the exhibitions
committee for the New Hampshire Potters Guild.
Some of her
work is presently on diplay at the “Thrown Faces” exhibit at Stone Garden
Gallery in downtown Concord. This January she will be taking part in an
upcoming exhibit called “BIG: Works of Surprizing Size and Impact” at the
Art Center at Hargate, at St. Paul’s School in Concord. She is preparing
a series of masks for that show. “Masks are a statement of culture,” says
Cleary. “It seems to me that technology now-a-days is taking away cultural
individualism.”
The
Bow Times
September 30, 1995
Contoocook
adds a touch of class, by Scott Fraser
With a “Newbury Street”
style, absent the snobby, nose-tilted persona of a fine Boston art gallery,
Anthony Mento has brought to Contoocook Village one of the finest art galleries
in the state s a superb frame shop.
One of the more riveting
displays uses a small old and weathered wooden box, mounted with its open
wire covered top facing the viewer. Inside the box, the clay figure of
a naked adult lies crumpled over in anguish. It forces one to wonder what
was on Deirdre Cleary’s mind when she created this work, was it a political
statement, a traumatic personal experience or simply something for people
to ponder?
Art
New England
June/July 1996
By Robert
R. Craven
Robert
Lincoln Levy Gallery
New Hampshire Art Association
New Members
This show presents works
of twenty-three members juried into the New Hampshire Art Association since
September 1994.
An oblique
approach is seen in Deirdre Cleary’s clay sculpture “A Journey”. A female
figure curls into an enclosing, screen like shelter on which a grid of
stamp-pad letters spells out an interlocking matrix of words – …..critic
/ in / close / soft / focus / safe / love / vow / doubt /….- a dictionary
of the psyche, a wall of words. Are they a defense against the outside
world or a public posting of vulnerability? And a wall has two sides; it
both shelters and isolates. This work makes a positive strength of its
ambiguity.
Concord
Monitor
Thursday, August 21, 1997
Welcome
to Eden; Millbrook Gallery’s sculpture
garden
teems with delights by Christine Hamm
Admission to this Eden is
free, and there are no serpents in evidence. But the area’s newest and
only sculpture garden, Mill Brook Gallery, does boast a nearly newborn
foal named Isabella, several Nubian goats and a battalion of free-spirited
ducks.
And if “Clark” could
talk, he might have complained about the daddy long-legs scrambling across
his forehead, into the deep oval of his right eye. “Clark” is a terra-cotta
planter. In lieu of hair, his creator, Deirdre Cleary, has crowned him
with a riot of punk pink blossoms. At Mill Brook, he fits right in.
The
Boston Sunday Globe
April 4, 1999
New Hampshire
Weekly – ARTS & PEOPLE
Old stuff
makes new statement; Artists make use of recycled
objects by D. Quincy Whitney, Globe Correspondent
Newport- Dreams are
carnivals. A nest is greater than its eggs. Caged emotion hides the child.
Midlife choices are tools in a chess game. Shadows in windows reveal memories
of train trips. Objects in a matchbox record a journey.
These thoughts, which
could begin poems, are actually three-dimensional poems make of recycled
and found objects by artists Deirdre Cleary and Gary Hamel that are among
the most memorable collages in a new exhibit, “Recycled Reinventions,”
at the Newport Library Arts Center.
In “The Dream,” Cleary
places a large ceramic face next to a miniature spinning Ferris wheel of
little faces. “There are little bits of dreams that combine together to
give the sense you are in a carnival seat. You are a powerless when you
are dreaming, so there are other things playing with your mind,” Cleary
explained in a recent interview at the exhibit opening.
Her “Unity” is a
nest perched inside two outstretched hands. Inside the nest are two ceramic
faces. “I love hands because they are so expressive/ They hold things,
do things, make things. The nest is like life; it holds life. The hands,
the nest, the two heads. It says something different when you put them
together; it tells a story,” said Cleary.
Cleary calls “The
Choice” her “father piece”. A man’s torso with outstretched hands holds
key. Inside his rib cage is a barred opening resembling a jail cell, behind
which, is a photograph of a child. “He was a very complex man and men of
his generation kept things inside. It was not until he was dying that I
was able to reach that child, that sensitive, vulnerable person inside.
You have the key to open that door so that you can live life more fully,
love more easily or be loved,” said Cleary.
In “Midlife,” Cleary
places an ambivalently posed female torso between two sets of chess pieces,
next to which are a gas gauge, a speedometer, and an old wooden shoe last.
“Life is a chess game and your next move will determine your next move.
It’s a game of chance, opportunity, and in midlife you need more time to
recoup, your r.p.m.’s are down, your gas gauge gets low. The shoe is the
shoe that walks the path of life,” said Cleary.
The
Boston Sunday Globe
October 17, 1999
New Hampshire
Weekly – ARTS & PEOPLE
Closer
Look, by Gail Kelley
In his statement
in the catalog for the New Hampshire Institute of Art’s “Biennial 1999”
Exhibition, the juror for
the show, Boston University Art Gallery director John Stomberg, alludes
to the inherent problem with juried exhibitions:
“In selecting an
invitational exhibition, one is faced with a fixed pool of possible artworks
based on those who applied. The submissions dictate the potential exhibition
regardless of which juror examines the work.”
Translation: Don’t
blame the juror if the exhibition is not uniformly outstanding. A juried
show is only as good as the work submitted.
In addition to determining
the best of the submissions, the juror has to select enough to fell the
exhibition space. This often results in the inclusion of work that is not
up to the level of the rest (which is why the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth
College stopped doing its juried exhibitions of regional artists a few
years ago, electing instead to have a curator seek out the work).
Judging from the
looks of “Biennial 1999,” Stomberg need not have make his disclaimer. What
he should have done was leave out the few weak pieces that are in this
show; there still would have been plenty of quality work remaining.
This is a strong
exhibition, so much so that the three prizes and one honorable mention
award could easily have gone to several other contenders.
Abstract world dominates
– not because of the juror’s preference, says Stomberg in his statement,
but because most of the submissions were abstract. Much of the work of
the 29 artists chosen for the exhibition (out of 250-plus entrants) also
displays a remarkable amount of risk-taking and experimentation – clay
on the walls, a flat sheet of paper made three-dimensional, glassmaking
combined with fine woodworking, oil paint made to look like pastels.
Symbolist works also
make a strong showing in this exhibition. Deirdre Cleary’s “The Dream”
won an honorable mention. Out of found metal objects and molded plaster,
Cleary make a construction consisting of a moon face encircled by spikes
(or maybe miniature Stonehenge-like monoliths), a clock with tiny faces
where numbers would ordinarily be, and an egg encased in a metal spring.
It all suggests the dream was about the female biological clock.
The
Union Leader
December 23-26, 1999
New Hampshire
Weekend
“Last Call”
millennium exhibition at Covered Bridge evokes reflection. by Laura Pope
An exhibit on display
through the end of January at the Covered Bridge Gallery in Contoocook
features the work of 10 artists chosen by the gallery for their artwork
reflecting a forceful political, social or environmental stance.
The resulting display,
primarily multimedia works and installations, exhibits the artists personal
views about the almost spent century, in settings ranging from calm reflection
and sorrowful loss to unbridled chaos.
Many ponder the relationship
of mankind and the other, older denizens of the Earth. Several mediums
are on display also, including kinetic and stone sculpture, assemblages,
encaustic studies, gum print photography, ceramics and paintings.
Gallery director
Sheryl Maltais noted several of the artists in “Last Call” were new to
the gallery and most submitted work make specifically for the millennium
show.
She also remarked
on the provocative nature of the exhibit as a whole, saying viewers would
leave with much to think about after sampling the artists’ various interpretations
of the past 100 years.
Some of the installations
emit a prominent message about the destructive presence of mankind on the
planet and on other inhabitants.
A strident ecological
and environmental message is transmitted though the work of Auburn potter
Deirdre Cleary. Entitled “A Question of Balance,” the multimedia installation
incorporates architectural pillars, ceramic sculpted hands and artifacts.
She writes: “We have
proven that we are ‘King of the Hill” on Earth. We can rape it if we want
and suffer the consequences, or we can choose to nurture and sustain the
ecosystem and other life forms. The decision is ours to make it is in our
hands.”
In representing the
idea of responsible stewardship, Cleary assembled five, 6-foot-tall pillars
into a V-shape. Atop each one she placed a pair of sculpted hands, each
reaching out to hold something. Then in four pair of hands, Cleary placed
a skull artifact of a boar, bear, coyote, fisher cat, and, in the fifth,
she placed a fishbowl with a fish in it.
“It’s about taking
account for our actions and making responsible changes for a more harmonious
existence with the planet that we share,” she wrote.
The
Boston Sunday Globe
December 19, 1999
New Hampshire
Weekly
Re: Millennium
Show; Covered Bridge Gallery, Contoocook
In “A Question of
Balance,” Deirdre Cleary invites the viewer into a kind of temple of the
woods where four pillars serve as pedestals for outstretched clay hands,
holding the skulls of coyote, boar, bear, and fisher cat. At the center
of the metaphoric clearing is the fifth “altar” pillar on which is place
a fishbowl holding a betta fish swimming in clear water.
Cleary observes in
her artist statement: “In the past century we have used our rivers and
oceans as dumping grounds for waste. We have put up fences, roads, and
dams blocking wildlife corridors, used pesticides and fertilizers on a
mass scale, and killed animals to the point of extinction…We have proven
to ourselves that we are ‘King of the Hill’ on earth. We can rape it if
we want and suffer the consequences, or we can choose to nurture and sustain
the ecosystem and other life forms. The decision is ours to make. It is
in our hands.”
Concord
Monitor
April 20, 2000
REFLECTIONS
ON A POEM
Jane Kenyon’s
“Long Gray Hair” inspires Women’s Caucus exhibition
By Christine
Hamm
Dust to dust, is
what Jane Kenyon told Bill Moyers in a 1996 American Masters Series video
as explanation of her poem, “Finding a Long Gray Hair.” Presumably, she
meant that the hair she found floating in a pail of water as she scrubbed
floors at hers and Donald Hall’s Wilmont home was not her own but belonged
to some forgotten ancestor; thus connecting her to the generations preceding.
But did the late
poet mean ashes to ashes, that they would all join in death? Or rather,
was she saying that by her repetition of a task that must have been done
many times before, that she and the women in the family had something extra
in common? Or simply that dust has a way of repeating itself – that next
week, next month, it would be back again in the same perennial turn that
had been going on long before Kenyon’s feet trod the ought floorboards?
Or did she mean all of the above? Such is the reach of poetry.
Kenyon’s poem is
short, a mere seven lines, but the sweep of the long gray hair is longer
than even she might have anticipated. Last week, its reach extended to
the Art Center in Hargate at St. Paul’s School in Concord. “Finding a Long
Gray Hair: Reflections On A Poem By Jane Kenyon,” is an exhibit by more
than 30 members of the New Hampshire Chapter of the Women’s Caucus. In
it, each artist has provided a visual interpretation of Kenyon’s poem.
The show will continue through May 5.
The poem goes as follows:
I SCRUB THE LONG FLOORBOARDS“I made her mental reflection become physical,” says Dorothy Abram. Abram, who lives in Dunbarton and is focusing on visual education while working toward a doctorate from Harvard, adopts Kenyon’s inspiration, a pail and water, as her own creative equipment. The concept could hardly be simpler; its impact, more effective. Behind the galvanized bucket, Abram has mounted a spotlight to bathe it in importance, at the same time providing an actual visual reflection from the surface of the water to the wall beyond. The reflection is a crescent moon, the symbol of both women and the cyclical nature of life.
IN THE KITCHEN, REPEATING
THE MOTIONS OF OTHER WOMEN
WHO HAVE LIVED IN THIS HOUSE.
AND WHEN I FIND A LONG GRAY HAIR
FLOATING IN THE PAIL,
I FEEL MY LIFE ADDED TO THEIRS.
“Through the image of the moon is created on the water, it appears above and beyond the pail,” says Abram. “In the same way, mundane domesticity leads the speaker to perceive a larger world and greater meaning within and beyond her simple chore.”
But scrubbing floors is a chore, as Mare Nazaire makes clear. Hers is another conceptual piece, focusing on one line from the poem, “the motions of other women.” The Portsmouth resident said it haunted her for months. Her work reflects the repetitive nature, what she calls the drudgery, of having to do menial tasks over and over. To emphasize that, the artist constructed a pile of small, square, once crumpled but now flattened, pieces of paper, each with a chore typed neatly in the center. Cleaning, one says. Others document cooking, washing, ironing, folding. For Nazaire, the stack, which resembles a stack of linens, symbolizes the work that is always there, always needing to be done.
Gallery assistant Carol Shelton admits she has had fun watching visitors’ reactions to the work. Not all, but some men go quickly in and out, she says. “Nothing for me mere,” one said briskly as he passed her desk.
But the young girls who come, Shelton notes a different reaction. Invariably, she says, they go directly to Auburn artist Deirdre Cleary’s work. It’s a bodacious Barbie Doll confection, entitled “Barbie’s Wedding,” a puff of white tulle and pink ribbon that covers nearly a whole wall. At top center there’s a bouquet of fake roses. Eight dolls, some held by white plaster hands, nestled in its expanse. It’s fun but also serious. Cleary says the iconic Barbie connects her to her two sisters, her childhood playmates, with whom she vicariously role-played the life they thought they would someday live. At one time they spent months planning and preparing a wedding for Barbie and Ken.
The Women’s Caucus for Art is a national organization founded in 1972. Five years ago, Concord resident Gail Smuda helped organize a local group to provide more opportunities for artists, especially women. Since then, the New Hampshire chapter has collaborated with groups in Boston, Connecticut and Vermont to present exhibits and educational programming through the region.